The Scarlet Letter

THE SCARLET LETTER.

BY

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

Illustrated.

[Illustration]

BOSTON:

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,

LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.

1878.

COPYRIGHT, 1850 AND 1877.

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.

_All rights reserved._

October 22, 1874.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Much to the author’s surprise, and (if he may say so without

additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his

sketch of official life, introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has

created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community

immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent,

indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last

smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against

whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public

disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of

deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read

over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge

whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his

power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it

appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are

its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which

he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein

described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or

political, he utterly disclaims such motives. The sketch might,

perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or

detriment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, he

conceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier

spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect

of truth.

The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory

sketch without the change of a word.

SALEM, March 30, 1850.

[Illustration]

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE CUSTOM HOUSE.—INTRODUCTORY 1

THE SCARLET LETTER.

I. THE PRISON-DOOR 51

II. THE MARKET-PLACE 54

III. THE RECOGNITION 68

IV. THE INTERVIEW 80

V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 90

VI. PEARL 104

VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL 118

VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 129

IX. THE LEECH 142

X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 155

XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART 168

XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 177

XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 193

XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN 204

XV. HESTER AND PEARL 212

XVI. A FOREST WALK 223

XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 231

XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 245

XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 253

XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 264

XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 277

XXII. THE PROCESSION 288

XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER 302

XXIV. CONCLUSION 315

[Illustration]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

_Drawn by_ MARY HALLOCK FOOTE _and Engraved by_ A. V. S. ANTHONY. _The

ornamental head-pieces are by_ L. S. IPSEN.

PAGE

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 1

THE PRISON DOOR 49

VIGNETTE,—WILD ROSE 51

THE GOSSIPS 57

“STANDING ON THE MISERABLE EMINENCE” 65

“SHE WAS LED BACK TO PRISON” 78

“THE EYES OF THE WRINKLED SCHOLAR GLOWED” 87

THE LONESOME DWELLING 93

LONELY FOOTSTEPS 99

VIGNETTE 104

A TOUCH OF PEARL’S BABY-HAND 113

VIGNETTE 118

THE GOVERNOR’S BREASTPLATE 125

“LOOK THOU TO IT! I WILL NOT LOSE THE CHILD!” 135

THE MINISTER AND LEECH 148

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 165

THE VIRGINS OF THE CHURCH 172

“THEY STOOD IN THE NOON OF THAT STRANGE SPLENDOR” 185

HESTER IN THE HOUSE OF MOURNING 195

MANDRAKE 211

“HE GATHERED HERBS HERE AND THERE” 213

PEARL ON THE SEA-SHORE 217

“WILT THOU YET FORGIVE ME?” 237

A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE 249

THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 257

CHILLINGWORTH,—“SMILE WITH A SINISTER MEANING” 287

NEW ENGLAND WORTHIES 289

“SHALL WE NOT MEET AGAIN?” 311

HESTER’S RETURN 320

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.

[Illustration: The Custom-House]

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.

INTRODUCTORY TO “THE SCARLET LETTER.”

It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch

of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal

friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have

taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was

three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and

for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the

intrusive author could imagine—with a description of my way of life

in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my

deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former

occasion—I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three

years’ experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous

“P. P., Clerk of this Parish,” was never more faithfully followed. The

truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon

the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his

volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him,

better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors,

indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such

confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed,

only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy;

as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were

certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature,

and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion

with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we

speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance

benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his

audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and

apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk;

and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,

we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of

ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent,

and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical,

without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain

propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining

how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession,

and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein

contained. This, in fact,—a desire to put myself in my true position

as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales

that make up my volume,—this, and no other, is my true reason for

assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the

main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to

give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore

described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among

whom the author happened to make one.

* * * * *

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago,

in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,—but which is now

burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no

symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way

down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a

Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,—at the

head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often

overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of

buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of

unthrifty grass,—here, with a view from its front windows adown this

not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a

spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during

precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops,

in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen

stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus

indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s

government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico

of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a

flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the

entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with

outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect

aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each

claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this

unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and

the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the

inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of

their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows

with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are

seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of

the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the

softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great

tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener

soon than late,—is apt to fling off her nestlings, with a scratch of

her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed

arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as

well name at once as the Custom-House of the port—has grass enough

growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn

by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,

however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with

a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of

that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by

itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and

ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their

ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood

of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or

four vessels happen to have arrived at once,—usually from Africa or

South America,—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,

there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the

granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may

greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel’s

papers under his arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his

owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as

his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in

merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him

under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will care to rid him of.

Here, likewise,—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded,

care-worn merchant,—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste

of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures

in his master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic-boats upon

a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor

in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and

feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the

captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the

British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the

alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight

importance to our decaying trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with

other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time

being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,

however, on ascending the steps, you would discern—in the entry, if

it were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms, if wintry or

inclement weather—a row of venerable figures, sitting in

old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back

against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might

be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and

with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of

almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on

charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but their own

independent exertions. These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at

the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence,

like him, for apostolic errands—were Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a

certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty

height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the

aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow

lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of

the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers;

around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and

gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt

the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with

old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has

elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from

the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into

which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very

infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a

voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside

it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and

infirm; and—not to forget the library—on some shelves, a score or

two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the

Revenue Laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a

medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And

here, some six months ago,—pacing from corner to corner, or lounging

on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes

wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper,—you might

have recognized, honored 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 has swept him

out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity, and pockets

his emoluments.

This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away

from it, both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess,

a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized

during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its

physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered

chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to

architectural beauty,—its irregularity, which is neither picturesque

nor quaint, but only tame,—its long and lazy street, lounging

wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows

Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse 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 struck into

the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the

original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance

in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a

city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have

mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion

of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a

little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment

which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few

of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation

is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to

know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that

first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky

grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can

remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with

the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of

the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on

account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned

progenitor,—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and

trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a

figure, as a man of war and peace,—a stronger claim than for myself,

whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,

legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the

Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter

persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their

histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman

of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any

record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too,

inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in

the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to

have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry

bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if

they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these

ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of

Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the

heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events,

I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon

myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I

have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race,

for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and

henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans

would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins,

that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family

tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its

topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever

cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine—if my

life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by

success—would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively

disgraceful. “What is he?” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers

to the other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in

life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in

his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might

as well have been a fiddler!” Such are the compliments bandied between

my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let

them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have

intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town’s earliest infancy and childhood, by these

two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here;

always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known,

disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the

other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable

deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.

Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and

there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the

accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred

years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each

generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a

boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting

the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and

grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to

the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his

world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the

natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its

place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being

and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or

moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.

The new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land, or whose

father or grandfather came—has little claim to be called a Salemite;

he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old

settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot

where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter

that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden

houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the

chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;—all these,

and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the

purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal

spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it

almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of

features and cast of character which had all along been familiar

here,—ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave,

another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main

street,—might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the

old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the

connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be

severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it

be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the

same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so

far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their

roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,

unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a

place in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice, when I might as well, or better,

have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first

time, nor the second, that I had gone away,—as it seemed,

permanently,—but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if

Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine

morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President’s

commission in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen

who were to aid me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive

officer of the Custom-House.

I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do not doubt at all—whether any public

functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military

line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his

orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once

settled, when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before

this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had kept the

Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude,

which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier,—New

England’s most distinguished soldier,—he stood firmly on the pedestal

of his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of

the successive administrations through which he had held office, he

had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and

heart-quake. General Miller was radically conservative; a man over

whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself

strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even

when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on

taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were

ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on

every sea, and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blasts,

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 bedridden, 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 labors, and soon

afterwards—as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their

country’s service, as I verily believe it was—withdrew to a better

world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my interference,

a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and

corrupt practices into which, as a matter of course, every

Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither the front nor

the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.

The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their

venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and

though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his

office with any reference to political services. Had it been

otherwise,—had an active politician been put into this influential

post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector,

whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his

office,—hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of

official life, within a month after the exterminating angel had come

up the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such

matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to

bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine.

It was plain enough to discern, that the old fellows dreaded some such

discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to

behold the terrors that attended my advent; to see a furrowed cheek,

weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the

glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or

another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days,

had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to

frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old

persons, that, by all established rule,—and, as regarded some of

them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business,—they

ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in politics,

and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I

knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the

knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and

considerably to the detriment of my official conscience, they

continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and

loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of

time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs

tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a

forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition

of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be 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 wagon-load of valuable merchandise had

been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their

unsuspicious noses,—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity

with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with

tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel.

Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed

rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution, after the

mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of

their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy.

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish

habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my

companion’s character, if it have a better part, is that which usually

comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize

the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers had good traits,

and as my position in reference to them, being paternal and

protective, was favorable 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 humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam

that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect

alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case,

however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the

phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent

all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place,

my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in

their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether

superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their

evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were

sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good

repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there

will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of

wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from

their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all

the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many

opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their

memories with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction

of their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, to-day’s, or to-morrow’s

dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the

world’s wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House—the patriarch, not only of this little

squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of

tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent

Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue

system, dyed in the wool, or, rather, born in the purple; since his

sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had

created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period

of the early ages which few living men can now remember. This

Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or

thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of

winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s

search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in

a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale

and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind

of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and

infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which

perpetually 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 that grew

inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably,

and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband

of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children,

most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had likewise

returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow

enough to imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, with a

sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to

carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next

moment, he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far

readier than the Collector’s junior clerk, who, at nineteen years, was

much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,

livelier curiosity, than any other form of humanity there presented to

my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one

point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an

absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no

soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but

instincts: and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his

character been put together, that there was no painful perception of

deficiency, but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found

in him. It might be difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he

should exist hereafter, so 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 savor of pig or turkey under one’s

very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate that had lingered

there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently

as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for his

breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest

at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was

marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually

rising up before him; not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful

for his former appreciation and seeking to resuscitate 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 carcass, and it could only be divided with an axe

and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be

glad to dwell at considerably more length because, of all men whom I

have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House

officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to

hint at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The

old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office

to the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down

to dinner with just as good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House

portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively

few opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the

merest outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General,

who, after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he

had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years

before, to spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. The

brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore

years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march,

burdened with infirmities which even the martial music of his own

spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. The

step was palsied now that had been foremost in the charge. It was only

with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on

the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascend the

Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor,

attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit,

gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came

and went; amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the

discussion of business, and the casual talk of the office; all which

sounds and circumstances seemed but indistinctly to impress his

senses, and hardly to make their way into his inner sphere of

contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly.

If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest

gleamed out upon his features; proving that there was light within

him, and that it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp

that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you penetrated

to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When no longer

called upon to speak, or listen, either of which operations cost him

an evident effort, his face would briefly subside into its former not

uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for,

though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework

of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled

into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such

disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up

anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view

of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may

remain almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound,

cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of

peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,—for, slight

as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that

of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be

termed so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was

marked with the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not

by a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished

name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by

an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required

an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles

to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the

man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his

nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that

flashes and flickers in a blaze; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of

iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression

of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at

the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under

some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,—roused

by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all 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 demeanor would have still been calm. Such an

exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be

anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him—as evidently as the

indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga already cited as the most

appropriate simile—were the features of stubborn and ponderous

endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier

days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a

somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unmanageable as a

ton of iron ore; and of benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the

bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine

a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of

the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I

know,—certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep

of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its

triumphant energy;—but, be that as it might, there was never in his

heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly’s

wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more

confidently make an appeal.

Many characteristics—and those, too, which contribute not the least

forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or

been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful

attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the

human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and

proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows

wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in

respect of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A

ray of humor, 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 shipmasters, the

spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of

this 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, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, 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

main-spring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for,

in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to

subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading

reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must

perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by

an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did

our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody

met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our

stupidity,—which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short

of crime,—would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make

the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him

not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect: it

was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor

can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so

remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the

administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to 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, that 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 subtile

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

look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally

well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough

organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle

at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur

at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in

my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart

from me. Nature,—except it were human nature,—the nature that is

developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all

the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed

away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty if it had not departed, was

suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something

sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it

lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It

might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not with

impunity be lived too long; else, it might have made me permanently

other than I had been without transforming me into any shape which it

would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other

than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low

whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and whenever a new

change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I

have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of

thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s

proportion of those qualities) may, at any time, be a man of affairs,

if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers,

and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties

brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light,

and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume,

had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the

more for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the

matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written

with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a

custom-house officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good

lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of

literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s

dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in

which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of

significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he

aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the

way of warning or rebuke; but, at any rate, I learned it thoroughly:

nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home

to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in

a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an

excellent fellow, who came into office with me and went out only a

little later—would often engage me in a discussion about one or the

other of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s

junior clerk, too—a young gentleman who, it was whispered,

occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam’s letter-paper with what (at

the distance of a few yards) looked very much like poetry—used now and

then to speak to me of books, as matters with which I might possibly

be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was

quite sufficient for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on

title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.

The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint,

on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of

all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities

had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on

such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a

name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I

hope, will never go again.

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while the thoughts that had

seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,

revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of

bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of

literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now

writing.

In the second story of the Custom-House there is a large room, in

which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with

panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale

adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea

of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far

more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall,

therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this

day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams,

appears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one

end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon

another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of

similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how

many days and weeks and months and years of toil had been wasted on

these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and

were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at

by human eyes. But, then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled not

with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of

inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone

equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in

their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of

all—without purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood

which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless

scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as

materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former

commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely

merchants,—old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and

many another magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was

scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain pile of wealth began to

dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now

compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty

and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much

posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon

as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier

documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been

carried off to Halifax, when all the King’s officials accompanied the

British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of

regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the

Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to

forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have

affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian

arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of

some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish

in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the

names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the

wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on ’Change, nor

very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such

matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we

bestow on the corpse of dead activity,—and exerting my fancy,

sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of

the old town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only

Salem knew the way thither,—I chanced to lay my hand on a small

package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.

This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long

past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more

substantial materials than at present. There was something about it

that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded

red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure

would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the

parchment cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and

seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of

his Majesty’s Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of

Massachusetts Bay. I remember to have read (probably in Felt’s Annals)

a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years

ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the

digging up of his remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter’s

Church, during the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call

to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect

skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic

frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very

satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers which the

parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr.

Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the

frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,

or at least written in his private capacity, and apparently with his

own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of

Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened

suddenly; and that these papers, which he probably kept in his

official desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were

supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of

the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public

concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early

day, with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted

some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian,

and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material

for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up

with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in

the preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the

present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes

equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so

far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration

for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they

shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, to

take the unprofitable labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I

contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.

But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package,

was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There

were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly

frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the glitter was

left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful

skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies

conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art,

not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads.

This rag of scarlet cloth,—for time and wear and a sacrilegious moth

had reduced it to little other than a rag,—on careful examination,

assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an

accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches

and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no

doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn,

or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by

it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in

these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely

interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet

letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep

meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were,

streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to

my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.

While thus perplexed,—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether

the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the

white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of Indians,—I

happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,—the reader may

smile, but must not doubt my word,—it seemed to me, then, that I

experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, of

burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot

iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto

neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had

been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find,

recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation

of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets containing

many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester

Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the

view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period between

the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth

century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from

whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in

their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and

solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date,

to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing

whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise,

to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart; by which

means, as a person of such propensities inevitably must, she gained

from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine,

was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying

further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and

sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is

referred to the story entitled “THE SCARLET LETTER”; and it should be

borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are

authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The

original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself,—a most

curious relic,—are still in my possession, and shall be freely

exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the

narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood as

affirming, that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the

motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure

in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old

Surveyor’s half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have

allowed myself, as to such points, nearly or altogether as much

license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I

contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track.

There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as

if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and

wearing his immortal wig,—which was buried with him, but did not

perish in the grave,—had met me in the deserted chamber of the

Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who had borne his

Majesty’s commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of

the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike,

alas! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant

of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the

lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen

but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the

little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he

had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and

reverence towards him,—who might reasonably regard himself as my

official ancestor,—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations

before the public. “Do this,” said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,

emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its

memorable wig,—“do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You

will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine,

when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom.

But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your

predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully 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 hundred-fold repetition, the

long extent from the front-door of the Custom-House to the

side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance

of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were

disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and

returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to

say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably

fancied that my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a

sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion—was, to get an

appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by

the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only

valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted

is the atmosphere of a custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy

and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies

yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would

ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a

tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable

dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The

characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable

by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would

take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but

retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face

with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. “What have you

to do with us?” that expression seemed to say. “The little power you

might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You

have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn

your wages!” In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy

twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam

claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness

held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks, and

rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and

reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of

Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought

the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The

same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort,

accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most

absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I

sat in the deserted parlor, 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

bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely

seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to

lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing

is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire

dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker

carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or

played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of

strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as

by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has

become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and

fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each

imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,

without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene

to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form

beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic

moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had

returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the

effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge

throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and

ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This

warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the

moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of

human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them

from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we

behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the

half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a

repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove

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 marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have

preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous

coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,

the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in

literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was

a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so

intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age;

or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter,

when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was

broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser

effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through

the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright

transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so

heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that

lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary

characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The

page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and

commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A

better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf

presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of

the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my

brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At

some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments

and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn

to gold upon the page.

These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only

conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless

toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of

affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and

essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That

was all. But, nevertheless, it is 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 favorable to the mode of life in question. In some

other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it

here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can

hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many

reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and

another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an

honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united

effort of mankind.

An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every

individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on

the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from

him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of

his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an

unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do

not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.

The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him

forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to

himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom

happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own

ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter

along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his

own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he

forever 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 endeavored to calculate how much

longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To

confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension,—as it would never

be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,

and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,—it

was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and

decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as

the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official

life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this

venerable friend,—to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and

to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the

sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who

felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the

whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I

was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated

better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the

tone of “P. P.”—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.

It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of

official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile

administration. His position is then one of the most singularly

irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched

mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on

either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event

may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a

man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within

the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by

whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be

injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness

throughout the contest, to observe the blood-thirstiness 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

neighbors—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

were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of

victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see

occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its

edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom

ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason

to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the

triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of

partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be

pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was

it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a

reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining

office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can

see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first

that fell!

The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am

inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.

Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so

serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if

the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the

accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the

consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested

themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was

requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and

vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a

person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and,

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 recognized by the Whigs

as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs—his tendency

to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may

meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren

of the same household must diverge from one another—had sometimes

made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a

friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no

longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as

settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to

be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been

content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many

worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four

years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then

to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy

of a friendly one.

Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or

two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state,

like Irving’s Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be

buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative

self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his

shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that

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 honors of public life, and

the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines of such antique

date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty

again.[1] Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the

whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED

SURVEYOR; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too

autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will

readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave.

Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness

to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!

[Footnote 1: At the time of writing this article the author

intended to publish, along with “The Scarlet Letter,” several

shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought

advisable to defer.]

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old

Inspector,—who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed

by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived

forever,—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 forever. The merchants,—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard,

Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,—these, and many other names, which had

such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of

traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the

world,—how little time has it required to disconnect me from them

all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I

recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my

old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist

brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real

earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary

inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes,

and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it

ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.

My good towns-people will not much regret me; for—though it has been

as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some

importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this

abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers—_there_ has never

been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in

order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst

other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do

just as well without me.

It may be, however,—O, transporting and triumphant thought!—that the

great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of

the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come,

among the sites memorable in the town’s history, shall point out the

locality of THE TOWN PUMP!

[Illustration]

[Illustration: The Prison Door]

[Illustration: Vignette,—Wild Rose]

THE SCARLET LETTER.

I.

THE PRISON-DOOR.

[Illustration]

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray,

steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and

others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the

door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron

spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and

happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it

among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the

virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a

prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that

the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere

in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out

the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his

grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated

sepulchres in the old 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, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which

evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early

borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side

of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild

rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,

which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to

the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came

forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity

and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;

but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so

long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally

overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for

believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann

Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us

to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our

narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal,

we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and

present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some

sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the

darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

II.

THE MARKET-PLACE.

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer

morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty

large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes

intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other

population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the

grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good

people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have

betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted

culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed

the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the

Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably

be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful

child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to

be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a

Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the

town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water

had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into

the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old

Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to

die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same

solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a

people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in

whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest

and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable

and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a

transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On

the other hand, a penalty, which, in our days, would infer a degree of

mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as

stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our

story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in

the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal

infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much

refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of

petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways,

and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into

the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well

as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of

old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants,

separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for,

throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has

transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer

beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less

force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing

about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the

period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether

unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and

the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit

more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright

morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed

busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off

island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of

New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech

among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle

us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume

of tone.

“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece

of my mind. It would be greatly for the public 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. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant

me. But she,—the naughty baggage,—little will she care what they

put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with

a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets

as brave as ever!”

“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by

the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be

always in her heart.”

[Illustration: The Gossips]

“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her

gown, or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest

as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This

woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not

law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the

statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect,

thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!”

“Mercy on us, goodwife,” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no

virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the

gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips! for the

lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne

herself.”

The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in

the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim

and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and

his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and

represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic

code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and

closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official

staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young

woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the

prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural

dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if

by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some

three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the

too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought

it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other

darksome apartment of the prison.

When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed

before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the

infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly

affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which

was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely

judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide

another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and

yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked

around at her towns-people and neighbors. 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 splendor in

accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was

allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large

scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the

sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from

regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the

impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was

lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those

days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the

delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized

as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more

lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she

issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had

expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were

astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out,

and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was

enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was

something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she

had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after

her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the

desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque

peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were,

transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been

familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if

they beheld her for the first time,—was that SCARLET LETTER, so

fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the

effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with

humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of

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 Madam Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as

for the red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow

a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one!”

“O, peace, neighbors, peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do

not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she

has felt it in her heart.”

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.

“Make way, good people, make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open

a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man,

woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this

time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of

the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!

Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the

market-place!”

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded

by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of

stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth

towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and

curious school-boys, 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 demeanor

was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those

that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the

street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however,

there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer

should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present

torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a

serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this

portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western

extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of

Boston’s earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which

now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and

traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as

effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was

the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the

platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that

instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in

its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very

ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance

of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our

common nature,—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,—no

outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for

shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester

Prynne’s instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her

sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform,

but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of

the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic

of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of

wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at

about the height of a man’s shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have

seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien,

and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image

of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with

one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed,

but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood,

whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of

deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such

effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty,

and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest

the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society

shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at

it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed

beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her

death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity,

but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would

find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had

there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must

have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no

less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a

judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat or

stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the

platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the

spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and

office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal

sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the

crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as

best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting

eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was

almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature,

she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs

of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but

there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the

popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid

countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the

object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,—each man,

each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their

individual parts,—Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a

bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it

was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs

shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the

scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the

most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,

glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped

and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was

preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this

roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western

wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the

brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences the most trifling

and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish

quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came

swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever

was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as

another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.

Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve

itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the

cruel weight and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view

that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had

been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable

eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her

paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken

aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the

portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with

its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the

old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of

heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and

which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a

gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own

face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior

of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There

she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a

pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the

lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet

those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it

was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the

study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to

recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher

than the right. Next rose before her, in memory’s picture-gallery, the

intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge

cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in

architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her,

still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but

feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a

crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back

the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the

towns-people 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!

[Illustration: “Standing on the Miserable Eminence”]

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!

[Illustration]

III.

THE RECOGNITION.

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and

universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length

relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which

irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native

garb, was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent

visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have

attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less

would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By

the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him,

stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage

costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could

hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his

features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it

could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by

unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of

his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavored to conceal or abate the

peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of

this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first

instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of

the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a

force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother

did not seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,

the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly, at

first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom

external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear

relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look

became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across

his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one

little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His

face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so

instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a

single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a

brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally

subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of

Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to

recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture

with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.

Then, touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he

addressed him, in a formal and courteous manner.

“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is

she here set up to public shame?”

“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the

townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage

companion, “else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester

Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I

promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.”

“You say truly,” replied the other. “I am a stranger, and have been a

wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by

sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk,

to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be

redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell

me of Hester Prynne’s,—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s

offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”

“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your

troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find

yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and

punished in the sight of rulers and people; as here in our godly New

England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain

learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam,

whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in

his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his

wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary

affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman

has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this

learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being

left to her own misguidance—”

“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger, with a bitter smile.

“So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his

books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father of yonder

babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which

Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?”

“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel

who shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madam

Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid

their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands

looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that

God sees him.”

“The learned man,” observed the stranger, with another smile, “should

come himself, to look into the mystery.”

“It behooves him well, if he be still in life,” responded the

townsman. “Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking

themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was

strongly tempted to her fall,—and that, moreover, as is most likely,

her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,—they have not been bold

to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The

penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of

heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three

hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the

remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her

bosom.”

“A wise sentence!” remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his head.

“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious

letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that

the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the

scaffold by her side. But he will be known!—he will be known!—he

will be known!”

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and, whispering a

few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through

the crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,

still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger; so fixed a gaze, that,

at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible

world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview,

perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she

now did, with the hot, 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 honor. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of

embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a

gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his

wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a

community, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state

of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and

tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age;

accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so

little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was

surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a

period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness

of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.

But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to

select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be

less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and

disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid

aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed

conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the

larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes

towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and

famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,

like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of

kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less

carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth,

rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he

stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while

his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were

winking, like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated

sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see

prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of

those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle

with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.

“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young

brother here, under whose preaching of the word you have been

privileged to sit,”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of

a pale young man beside him,—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this

godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven,

and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the

people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing

your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what

arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might

prevail over your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no

longer hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But

he opposes to me (with a young man’s 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 behooves you, therefore, to exhort her

to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon

the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one

of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the

age into our wild forest-land. His eloquence and religious fervor had

already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a

person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending

brow, large brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he

forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both

nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint.

Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments,

there was an air about this young minister,—an apprehensive, a

startled, a half-frightened look,—as of a being who felt himself

quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and

could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far

as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus

kept himself simple and childlike; coming forth, when occasion was,

with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as

many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor

had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in

the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred

even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the

blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.

“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to

her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to

thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it

seemed, and then came forward.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down

steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and

seest the accountability under which I labor. 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 to the scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the

Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath

been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou

hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to

take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”

“Never!” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into

the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply

branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his

agony, as well as mine!”

“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding

from the crowd about the scaffold. “Speak; and give your child a

father!”

“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but

responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. “And my

child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly

one!”

“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the

balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his

appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength

and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”

[Illustration: “She was led back to Prison”]

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the

elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,

addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches,

but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly

did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his

periods were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new

terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue

from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept

her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of

weary indifference. She had borne, that morning, all that nature could

endure; and as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from

too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself

beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal

life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher

thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant,

during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its

wailings and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed

scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanor,

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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

IV.

THE INTERVIEW.

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a

state of nervous excitement that demanded constant watchfulness, lest

she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied

mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible

to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment,

Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He

described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical

science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could

teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the

forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional

assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for

the child; who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed

to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair,

which pervaded the mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of

pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony

which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment appeared that

individual, of singular aspect, whose presence in the crowd had been

of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was

lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most

convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the

magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting

his ransom. His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer,

after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the

comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had

immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to

moan.

“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the

practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in

your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be

more amenable to just authority than you may have found her

heretofore.”

“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett,

“I shall own you for a man of skill indeed! Verily, the woman hath

been like a possessed one; and there lacks little, that I should take

in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of

the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his

demeanor 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 recognize my voice or aspect as a father’s.

Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with

strongly marked apprehension into his face.

“Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.

“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half

soothingly. “What should ail me, to harm this misbegotten and

miserable babe? The medicine is potent for good; and were it my

child,—yea, mine own, as well as thine!—I could do no better for

it.”

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of

mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the

draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge.

The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings

gradually ceased; and, in a few moments, as is the custom of young

children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy

slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next

bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny he

felt her pulse, looked into her eyes,—a gaze that made her heart

shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and

cold,—and, finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to

mingle another draught.

“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many

new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them,—a recipe that

an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were

as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless

conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and

heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous

sea.”

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest

look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt

and questioning, as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at

her slumbering child.

“I have thought of death,” said she,—“have wished for it,—would even

have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for

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 bookworm 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

philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.

Between thee and me the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the

man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”

“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.

“That thou shalt never know!”

“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and

self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there

are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth,

in the invisible sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man

who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a

mystery. Thou 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 hands over her heart, dreading lest he

should read the secret there at once.

“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he,

with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He

bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but

I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I

shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own

loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine

that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his

fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let

him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be

mine!”

“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But

thy words interpret thee as a terror!”

“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,”

continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.

Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me.

Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me husband!

Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for,

elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a

woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest

ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of

right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home

is where thou art, and where he is. But betray me not!”

[Illustration: “The Eyes of the wrinkled Scholar glowed”]

“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 dishonor

that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other

reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,

therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of

whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign,

by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest

of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his

life, will be in my hands. Beware!”

“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.

“Swear it!” rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger 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!”

[Illustration]

V.

HESTER AT HER NEEDLE.

Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door

was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling

on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no

other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps

there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from

the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle

that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at

which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was

supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the

combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the

scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and

insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,

therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength

that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that

condemned her—a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support,

as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up, through

the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended

walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom; and she must either

sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,

or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help

her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial

with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own

trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to

be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with

the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never

to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile

up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up

her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the

preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and

embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the

young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter

flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at

her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,—at her,

who had once been innocent,—as the figure, the body, the reality of

sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would

be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her,—kept by no

restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the

Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure,—free to return to her

birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her

character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if

emerging into another state of being,—and having also the passes of

the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her

nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life

were alien from the law that had condemned her,—it may seem

marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home,

where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there

is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has

the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to

linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and

marked event has given the color 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, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before

the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a

joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the

tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and

laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized,

and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the

face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled

herself to believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive

for continuing a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a

self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her

guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so,

perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her

soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more

saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

[Illustration: The Lonesome Dwelling]

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,

within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any

other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been

built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it

was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put

it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the

habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin

of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of

scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much

conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some

object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed.

In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she

possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an

inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her

infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself

to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman

should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep

nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or

standing in the doorway, or laboring 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 needlework. She bore on her

breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her

delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might

gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual

adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here,

indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the

Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the

finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age,

demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not

fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast

behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense

with. Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of

magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a

new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of

policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a

sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought

bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to

the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were

readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while

sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian

order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the

dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth

and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and

characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply.

Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still

another possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be

termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so

miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a

fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever

other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,

on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester

really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is

certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many

hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,

chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and

state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her

needlework was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it

on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s

little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the

coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single

instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil

which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception

indicated the ever-relentless rigor 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 might rather say,

a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy

charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which

appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it

hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her

infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on

wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently

insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might

readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in

making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an

idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a

real sacrifice of enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude

handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental

characteristic,—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in

the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all

the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive

a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil

of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of

expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all

other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience

with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine

and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might

be deeply wrong, beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the

world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it

could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her,

more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow

of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was

nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture,

every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in

contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as

much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with

the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human

kind. She stood apart from 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 succor them. Dames of elevated rank,

likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were

accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes

through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a

subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser

expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a

rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long

and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of

crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again

subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient,—a martyr,

indeed,—but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of

her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly

twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the

innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for

her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal.

Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that

brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor,

sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath

smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself

the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for

they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible

in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never

any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to

pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the

utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own

minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips

that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion

of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no

deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story

among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the

wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in

the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet

letter,—and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into

Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet

always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then,

again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its

cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in

short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human

eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the

contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.

[Illustration: Lonely Footsteps]

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she

felt an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to

give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next

instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;

for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned

alone?

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer

moral and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the

strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with

those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was

outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester,—if

altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted,—she

felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a

new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing,

that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other

hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus

made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers

of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman,

as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but

a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet

letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or,

must she receive those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as

truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so

awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked

her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought

it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would

give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or

magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of

antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with

angels. “What evil thing is at hand?” would Hester say to herself.

Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the

scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic

sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the

sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor 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

rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

VI.

PEARL.

[Illustration]

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 dishonored bosom, to connect her

parent forever 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

vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,

the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to

have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the

world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace

which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire,

however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very

garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in

rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better

understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be

procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the

arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before

the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure, when thus

arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl’s own proper beauty,

shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a

paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around

her, on the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and

soiled with the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as

perfect. Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety;

in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full

scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the

pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there

was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost;

and if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she

would have ceased to be herself,—it would have been no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly

express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared

to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears

deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into

which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In

giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was

a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all

in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the

point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be

discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and

even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself

had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her

soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material

of earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through

which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral

life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep

stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and

the untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the

warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl.

She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness

of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and

despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated

by the morning radiance of a young child’s disposition, but later in

the day of earthly existence might be prolific of the storm and

whirlwind.

The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid

kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application

of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in

the way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen

for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,

nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of

erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own

errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but

strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her

charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles

and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any

calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside,

and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical

compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As

to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or

heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in

accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while

Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,

that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist,

persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable,

so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a

wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such

moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy

sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while

upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever

that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested

her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were

hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that

comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither. Beholding it,

Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,—to pursue the

little elf in the flight which she invariably began,—to snatch her to

her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses,—not so much from

overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood,

and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s laugh, when she was caught,

though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than

before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often

came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so

dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into

passionate tears. Then, perhaps,—for there was no foreseeing how it

might affect her,—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and

harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of

discontent. Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before,

like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this

more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and

sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on

proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly

safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness; it passed, as

suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt

like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the

process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should

control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real

comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was

sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;

until—perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath

her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!

How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed!—did Pearl arrive at an

age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother’s

ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would

it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like

voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have

distinguished and unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the

entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never

be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,

emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.

Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with

which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had

drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in

short, of her position in respect to other children. Never, since her

release from prison, had Hester met the public gaze without her. In

all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe

in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her

mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along

at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the

children of the settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at

the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashion

as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church,

perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham-fight

with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative

witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make

acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children

gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively

terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with

shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because

they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown

tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant

brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,

unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and

child; and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not

unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the

sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be

supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce

temper had a kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because

there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of

the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child’s

manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again,

a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this

enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of

Hester’s heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle

of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed

to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester

Prynne before Pearl’s birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by

the softening influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a

wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth

from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand

objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The

unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the

puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward

change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the

stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of

imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees,

aged, black and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy

utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as

Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children,

whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was

wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her

intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing,

always in a state of preternatural activity,—soon sinking down, as if

exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by

other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as

the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise

of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there

might be little more than was observable in other children of bright

faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was

thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The

singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded

all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a

friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth,

whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to

battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what depth of sorrow to a

mother, who felt in her own heart the cause!—to observe, in one so

young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a

training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the

contest that must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,

and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but

which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan,—“O

Father in Heaven,—if Thou art still my Father,—what is this being

which I have brought into the world!” And Pearl, overhearing the

ejaculation, or aware, through some more 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.

[Illustration: A touch of Pearl’s baby-hand]

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 endeavoring to tear it away; so

infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s

baby-hand. Again, as if her mother’s agonized gesture were meant only

to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and

smile! From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had

never felt a moment’s safety; not a moment’s calm enjoyment of her.

Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze

might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it

would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always

with that peculiar smile, and odd expression of the eyes.

Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes, while

Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of

doing; and, suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled

hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she fancied that

she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face, in the

small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of

smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had

known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in

them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just

then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been

tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big

enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of

wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom;

dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet

letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her

clasped hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling

that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain,

she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly

into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers,

almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast

with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew

how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the

child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing

image of a fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother

so imagined it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.

“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.

“O, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.

But, while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down,

with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak

might be to fly up the chimney.

“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment,

with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful

intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not

acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now

reveal herself.

“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.

“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother,

half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came

over her, in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what

thou art, and who sent thee hither.”

“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and

pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”

“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of

the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or

because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger,

and touched the scarlet letter.

“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly

Father!”

“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,

suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into this world. He sent even me,

thy mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish

child, whence didst thou come?”

“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing,

and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal

labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the

talk of the neighboring towns-people; 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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

VII.

THE GOVERNOR’S HALL.

[Illustration]

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

honorable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.

Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of

embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview

with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the

settlement. It had reached her ears, that there was a design on the

part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid

order of principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her

child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon

origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian

interest in the mother’s soul required them to remove such a

stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were

really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the

elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the

fairer prospect of these advantages, by being transferred to wiser and

better guardianship than Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the

design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It

may appear singular, and indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an

affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been referred to

no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town, should

then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen

of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however,

matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic

weight, than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed

up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period

was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute

concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce and

bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in

an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.

Full of concern, therefore,—but so conscious of her own right that it

seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one side,

and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the

other,—Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little

Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run

lightly along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion, from

morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than

that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than

necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as

imperious to be set down again, and frisked onward before Hester on

the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have

spoken of Pearl’s rich and luxuriant beauty; a beauty that shone with

deep and vivid tints; a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity

both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and

which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire

in her and throughout her; she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a

passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had

allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play;

arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly

embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread. So much

strength of coloring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to

cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty,

and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced

upon the earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the

child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded

the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon

her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet

letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy

were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions

assumed its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing

many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the

object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But,

in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in

consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to

represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the

children of the Puritans looked up from their play,—or what passed

for play with those sombre little urchins,—and spake 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

befitted Aladdin’s palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old

Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly

cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the

age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had

now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and

dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine

should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.

“No, my little Pearl!” said her mother. “Thou must gather thine own

sunshine. I have none to give thee!”

They approached the door; which was of an arched form, and flanked on

each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of

which were lattice-windows, with wooden shutters to close over them at

need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne

gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor’s

bond-servants; a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave.

During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much

a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf

wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men of

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 honorable worship is within. But he hath

a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see

his worship now.”

“Nevertheless, I will enter,” answered Hester Prynne, and the

bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the

glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land,

offered no opposition.

So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of

entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his

building-materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of

social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after

the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here,

then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the

whole depth of the house, and forming a medium of general

communication, more or less directly, with all the other apartments.

At one extremity, this spacious room was lighted by the windows of the

two towers, which formed a small recess on either side of the portal.

At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more

powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall-windows which we

read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned

seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the

Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as,

in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be

turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted

of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved

with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste;

the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and

heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor’s paternal home. On

the table—in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had

not been left behind—stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of

which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the

frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.

On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of

the Bellingham lineage, some with armor on their breasts, and others

with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterized by the

sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if

they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies,

and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits

and enjoyments of living men.

[Illustration: The Governor’s Breastplate]

At about the centre of the oaken panels, that lined the hall, was

suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic,

but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful

armorer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came

over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a

gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging

beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly

burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination

everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for

mere idle show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn

muster and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of

a regiment in the Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and

accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch as his

professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had

transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman

and ruler.

Little Pearl—who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armor as

she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house—spent some

time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.

“Mother,” cried she, “I see you here. Look! Look!”

Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that, owing

to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was

represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be

greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she

seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upward, also, at a

similar picture in the 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 farther end of the

hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with

closely shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt

at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have

relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of

the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close struggle for

subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening.

Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some

distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of

its gigantic products directly beneath the hall-window; as if to warn

the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an

ornament as New England earth would offer him. There were a few

rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the

descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first

settler of the peninsula; that half-mythological personage, who rides

through our early annals, seated on the back of a bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would

not be pacified.

“Hush, child, hush!” said her mother, earnestly. “Do not cry, dear

little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and

gentlemen along with him!”

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue a number of persons were

seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her

mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then

became silent; not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick

and mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance

of these new personages.

[Illustration]

VIII.

THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER.

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap,—such as elderly

gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic

privacy,—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate,

and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference

of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray beard, in the antiquated

fashion of King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little

like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his

aspect, so rigid and severe, and 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 grave forefathers—though accustomed

to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial and

warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life

at the behest of duty—made it a matter of conscience to reject such

means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp.

This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor,

John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over

Governor Bellingham’s shoulder; while its wearer suggested that pears

and peaches might yet be naturalized in the New England climate, and

that purple grapes might possibly be compelled to nourish, 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 labors and duties of the pastoral

relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps,

and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall-window, found himself

close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester

Prynne, and partially concealed her.

“What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise

at the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen

the like, since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I

was wont to esteem it a high favor 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 favorite 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 fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the

Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together

with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in

coming hither.

Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something

in the young clergyman’s ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of

skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was

startled to perceive what a change had come over his features,—how

much uglier they were,—how his dark complexion seemed to have grown

duskier, and his figure more misshapen,—since the days when she had

familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an instant, but was

immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now

going forward.

“This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the

astonishment into which Pearl’s response had thrown him. “Here is a

child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without

question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present

depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no

further.”

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,

confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce

expression. Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole

treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed

indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to

the death.

“God gave me the child!” cried she. “He gave her in requital of all

things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!—she is

my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes

me too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being

loved, and so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution for

my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!”

[Illustration: “Look thou to it! I will not lose the child!”]

“My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minister, “the child shall be

well cared for!—far better than thou canst do it!”

“God gave her into my keeping,” repeated Hester Prynne, raising her

voice almost to a shriek. “I will not give her up!”—And here, by a

sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at

whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to

direct her eyes.—“Speak thou for me!” cried she. “Thou wast my

pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and 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 care-worn 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 armor rang with it,—“truth in what Hester says, and in the

feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too,

an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements,—both

seemingly so peculiar,—which no other mortal being can possess. And,

moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation

between this mother and this child?”

“Ay!—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?” interrupted the Governor.

“Make that plain, I pray you!”

“It must be even so,” resumed the minister. “For, if we deem it

otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the Creator

of all flesh, hath lightly recognized a deed of sin, and made of no

account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This

child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame hath come from the

hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so

earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her.

It was meant for a blessing; for the one blessing of her life! It was

meant, doubtless, as the mother herself hath told us, for a

retribution too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought-of moment;

a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled

joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor

child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her

bosom?”

“Well said, again!” cried good Mr. Wilson. “I feared the woman had no

better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!”

“O, not so!—not so!” continued Mr. Dimmesdale. “She recognizes,

believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought, in the

existence of that child. And may she feel, too,—what, methinks, is

the very truth,—that this boon was meant, above all things else, to

keep the mother’s soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths

of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her!

Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an

infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow,

confided to her care,—to be trained up by her to righteousness,—to

remind her, at every moment, of her fall,—but yet to teach her, as it

were by the Creator’s sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to

heaven, the child also will bring its parent thither! Herein is the

sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s

sake, then, and no less for the poor child’s sake, let us leave them

as Providence hath seen fit to place them!”

“You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger

Chillingworth, smiling at him.

“And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,”

added the Reverend Mr. Wilson. “What say you, worshipful Master

Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well for the poor woman?”

“Indeed hath he,” answered the magistrate, “and hath adduced such

arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so

long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman.

Care must be had, nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated

examination in the catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale’s.

Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that she

go both to school and to meeting.”

The young minister, on ceasing to speak, had withdrawn a few steps

from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the

heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure,

which the sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the

vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf,

stole softly towards him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both her

own, laid her cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so

unobtrusive, that her mother, who was looking on, asked herself,—“Is

that my Pearl?” Yet she knew that there was love in the child’s heart,

although it mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her

lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as now. The

minister,—for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is

sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded

spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply

in us something truly worthy to be loved,—the minister looked round,

laid his hand on the child’s head, hesitated an instant, and then

kissed her brow. Little Pearl’s unwonted mood of sentiment lasted no

longer; she laughed, and went capering down the hall, so airily, that

old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her tiptoes touched the

floor.

“The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess,” said he to Mr.

Dimmesdale. “She needs no old woman’s broomstick to fly withal!”

“A strange child!” remarked old Roger Chillingworth. “It is easy to

see the mother’s part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher’s

research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyze that child’s nature, and,

from its make and mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?”

“Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clew of

profane philosophy,” said Mr. Wilson. “Better to fast and pray upon

it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it,

unless Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good

Christian man hath a title to show a father’s kindness towards the

poor, deserted babe.”

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with

Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is

averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and

forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins,

Governor Bellingham’s bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few

years later, was executed as a witch.

“Hist, hist!” said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to

cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. “Wilt thou go

with us to-night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I

wellnigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make

one.”

“Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with a

triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little

Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with

thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too,

and that with mine own blood!”

“We shall have thee there anon!” said the witch-lady, frowning, as she

drew back her head.

But here—if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and

Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable—was already an

illustration of the young minister’s argument against sundering the

relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus

early had the child saved her from Satan’s snare.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

IX.

THE LEECH.

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will

remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had

resolved should never more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the

crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne’s ignominious exposure, stood a

man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous

wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the

warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the

people. Her matronly fame was trodden under all men’s feet. Infamy was

babbling around her in the public market-place. For her kindred,

should the tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her

unspotted life, there remained nothing but the contagion of her

dishonor; which would not fail to be distributed in strict accordance

and proportion with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous

relationship. Then why—since the choice was with himself—should the

individual, whose connection with the fallen woman had been the most

intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim

to an inheritance so little desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried

beside her on her pedestal of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne,

and possessing the lock and key of her silence, he chose to withdraw

his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties

and interests, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay

at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumor 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 subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and

that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of

that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to

comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the health of the

good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had

hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary,

whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his

favor 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 pharmacopœia, which so many learned doctors had spent

centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded, at least, the

outward forms of a religious life, and, early after his arrival, had

chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young

divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was

considered by his more fervent admirers as little less than a

heaven-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labor for the

ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds for the now feeble New

England Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of

the Christian faith. About this period, however, the health of Mr.

Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail. By those best acquainted with

his habits, the paleness of the young minister’s cheek was accounted

for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of

parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which

he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this

earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some

declared, that, if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was

cause enough, that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden

by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic

humility, avowed his belief, that, if Providence should see fit to

remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to perform its

humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as

to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact.

His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a

certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on

any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his

heart, with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.

Such was the young clergyman’s condition, and so imminent the prospect

that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger

Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the

scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down, as it were, out of

the sky, or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery,

which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be

a man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs, and the

blossoms of wild-flowers, and dug up roots, and plucked off twigs from

the forest-trees, like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was

valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby,

and other famous men,—whose scientific attainments were esteemed

hardly less than supernatural,—as having been his correspondents or

associates. Why, with such rank in the learned world, had he come

hither? What could he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in

the wilderness? In answer to this query, a rumor 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 favorable 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

labors? 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 labors, 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.

[Illustration: The Minister and Leech]

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the

medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the

disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look

into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so

different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the

sake of the minister’s health, and to enable the leech to gather

plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the

sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and

murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops.

Often, likewise, one was the guest of the other, in his place of

study and retirement. There was a fascination for the minister in the

company of the man of science, in whom he recognized an intellectual

cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together with a range and

freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the

members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled, if not

shocked, to find this attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a

true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment

largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself

powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage

continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society

would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would

always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about

him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework. Not

the less, however, though with a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the

occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of

another kind of intellect than those with which he habitually held

converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer

atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was

wasting itself away, amid lamplight, or obstructed day-beams, and the

musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But

the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with comfort. So

the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew again within the

limits of what their church defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he

saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the

range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown

amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out

something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential,

it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the

physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur

Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so

intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its

groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill, the kind

and friendly physician—strove to go deep into his patient’s bosom,

delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and

probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a

dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has

opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow

it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the

intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and

a nameless something more,—let us call it intuition; if he show no

intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his

own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his

mind into such affinity with his patient’s, that this last shall

unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if

such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so

often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath,

and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if to

these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded

by his recognized character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable

moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in

a dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the

daylight.

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above

enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have

said, grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a

field as the whole sphere of human thought and study, to meet upon;

they discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs

and private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters

that seemed personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the

physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister’s

consciousness into his companion’s ear. The latter had his suspicions,

indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale’s bodily disease had

never fairly been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr.

Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the

same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister’s life-tide

might pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There

was much joy throughout the town, when this greatly desirable object

was attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for the

young clergyman’s welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as

felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one of the many

blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted

wife. This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that

Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all

suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his

articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as

Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at

another’s board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot

who seeks to warm himself only at another’s fireside, it truly seemed

that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his

concord of paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the

very man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good

social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on

which the venerable structure of King’s Chapel has since been built.

It had the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson’s home-field, on one

side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited

to their respective employments, in both minister and man of physic.

The motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front

apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create

a noontide shadow, when desirable. The walls were hung round with

tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,

representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan

the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman

of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.

Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with

parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and

monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they

vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often

to avail themselves. On the other side of the house old Roger

Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern

man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with

a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and

chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to

purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned

persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly

passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and

not incurious inspection into one another’s business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s best discerning friends, as we

have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence

had done all this, for the purpose—besought in so many public, and

domestic, and secret prayers—of restoring the young minister to

health. But—it must now be said—another portion of the community had

latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr.

Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed

multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be

deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on

the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus

attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the

character of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case

of which we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger

Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation.

There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen

of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder, now some

thirty years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under

some other name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in

company with Doctor Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was

implicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted,

that the man of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his

medical attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage

priests; who were universally acknowledged to be powerful enchanters,

often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the

black art. A large number—and many of these were persons of such

sober sense and practical observation that their opinions would have

been valuable, in other matters—affirmed that Roger Chillingworth’s

aspect had undergone a remarkable change while he had dwelt in town,

and especially since his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his

expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like. Now, there was

something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously

noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight, the oftener

they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his

laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with

infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting

sooty with the smoke.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion, that

the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of especial

sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by

Satan himself, or Satan’s emissary, in the guise of old Roger

Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a

season, to burrow into the clergyman’s intimacy, and plot against his

soul. No sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which side the

victory would turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see

the minister come forth out of the conflict, transfigured with the

glory which he would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it

was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must

struggle towards his triumph.

Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depths of the poor

minister’s eyes, the battle was a sore one and the victory anything

but secure.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

X.

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT.

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in

temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in

all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun

an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity

of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved

no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem,

instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he

proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still

calm, necessity, seized the old man within its gripe, and never set

him free again, until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the

poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather,

like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that

had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing

save mortality and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were

what he sought!

Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician’s eyes, burning blue

and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like

one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan’s awful

doorway in the hillside, and quivered on the pilgrim’s face. The soil

where this dark miner was working had perchance shown indications that

encouraged him.

“This man,” said he, at one such moment, to himself, “pure as they

deem him,—all spiritual as he seems,—hath inherited a strong animal

nature from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little further in

the direction of this vein!”

Then, after long search into the minister’s dim interior, and turning

over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the

welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural

piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by

revelation,—all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than

rubbish to the seeker,—he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his

quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as

cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a

chamber where a man lies only half asleep,—or, it may be, broad

awake,—with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards

as the apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the

floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow

of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his

victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve

often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely

aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into

relation with him. But old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions

that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled

eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful,

sympathizing, but never intrusive friend.

Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual’s character

more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are

liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no

man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter

actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse

with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting

the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by

which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill

of the open window, that looked towards the graveyard, he talked with

Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of

unsightly plants.

“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them,—for it was the

clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, nowadays, looked straightforth

at any object, whether human or inanimate,—“where, my kind doctor,

did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?”

“Even in the 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, nor other memorial of the dead

man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep

him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be,

some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done

better to confess during his lifetime.”

“Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly desired it, but could

not.”

“And wherefore?” rejoined the physician. “Wherefore not; since all the

powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that

these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make

manifest an unspoken crime?”

“That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours,” replied the minister.

“There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine

mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem,

the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making

itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day

when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or

interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human

thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the

retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these

revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the

intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand

waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain.

A knowledge of men’s hearts will be needful to the completest solution

of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding

such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that

last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”

“Then why not reveal them here?” asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing

quietly aside at the minister. “Why should not the guilty ones sooner

avail themselves of this unutterable solace?”

“They mostly do,” said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast as if

afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. “Many, many a poor soul

hath given its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while

strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an

outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful

brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after long

stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why

should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep

the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at

once, and let the universe take care of it!”

“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,” observed the calm physician.

“True; there are such men,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale. “But, not to

suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by

the very constitution of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose

it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s

glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black

and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be

achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service.

So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their

fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow while their hearts

are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid

themselves.”

“These men deceive themselves,” said Roger Chillingworth, with

somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with

his forefinger. “They fear to take up the shame that rightfully

belongs to them. Their love for man, their zeal for God’s

service,—these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts

with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and

which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they

seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands!

If they would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making

manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to

penitential self-abasement! Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise

and pious friend, that a false show can be better—can be more for

God’s glory, or man’s welfare—than God’s own truth? Trust me, such

men deceive themselves!”

“It may be so,” said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a

discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a

ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his

too sensitive and nervous temperament.—“But, now, I would ask of my

well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have

profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?”

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild

laughter of a young child’s voice, proceeding from the adjacent

burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window,—for it was

summer-time,—the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl

passing along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked

as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse

merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely

out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped

irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad,

flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy,—perhaps of Isaac

Johnson himself,—she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother’s

command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little

Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which

grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them

along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal

bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered.

Hester did not pluck them off.

Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window, and smiled

grimly down.

“There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human

ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s

composition,” remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. “I

saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water, at

the cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What, in Heaven’s name, is she? Is

the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any

discoverable principle of being?”

“None, save the freedom of a broken law,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in

a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself.

“Whether capable of good, I know not.”

The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the

window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence,

she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The

sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light

missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands, in the

most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily

looked up; and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one

another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted,—“Come

away, mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He

hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will

catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!”

So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking

fantastically, among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature

that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor

owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh, out

of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life,

and be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being reckoned

to her for a crime.

“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause,

“who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of

hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester

Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her

breast?”

“I do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman. “Nevertheless, I

cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I

would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it

must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as

this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.”

There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine and

arrange the plants which he had gathered.

“You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he, at length, “my

judgment as touching your health.”

“I did,” answered the clergyman, “and would gladly learn it. Speak

frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death.”

“Freely, then, and plainly,” said the physician, still busy with his

plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, “the disorder is a

strange one; not so much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested,—in

so far, at least, as the symptoms have been laid open to my

observation. Looking daily at you, my good Sir, and watching the

tokens of your aspect, now for months gone by, I should deem you a man

sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and

watchful physician might well hope to cure you. But—I know not what

to say—the disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not.”

“You speak in riddles, learned Sir,” said the pale minister, glancing

aside out of the window.

“Then, to speak more plainly,” continued the physician, “and I crave

pardon, Sir,—should it seem to require pardon,—for this needful

plainness of my speech. Let me ask,—as your friend,—as one having

charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well-being,—hath

all the operation of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted

to me?”

“How can you question it?” asked the minister. “Surely, it were

child’s play, to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!”

“You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said Roger Chillingworth,

deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated

intelligence, on the minister’s face. “Be it so! But, again! He to

whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth,

oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A

bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself,

may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual

part. Your pardon, once again, good Sir, if my speech give the shadow

of offence. You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body

is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak,

with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”

“Then I need ask no further,” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily

rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the

soul!”

“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an

unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption,—but standing up,

and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his

low, dark, and misshapen figure,—“a sickness, a sore place, if we may

so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate

manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your

physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first lay

open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?”

“No!—not to thee!—not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr.

Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and

with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. “Not to thee!

But if it be the soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one

Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with his good pleasure, can

cure; or he can kill! Let him do with me as, in his justice and

wisdom, he shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this

matter?—that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?”

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to

himself, looking after the minister with a grave smile. “There is

nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how

passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As

with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing erenow,

this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!”

[Illustration: The Leech and his Patient]

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 a professional interview, with a mysterious

and puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr.

Dimmesdale’s presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician

crossed the threshold.

“A rare case!” he muttered. “I must needs look deeper into it. A

strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art’s

sake, I must search this matter to the bottom!”

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the

Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into

a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter

volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast

ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of

the minister’s repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one

of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is as light, as fitful, and

as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an

unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into

itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger

Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the

room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid

his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that,

hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye.

Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.

After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

But, with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a

ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the

eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole

ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by

the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the

ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old

Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had

no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul

is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.

But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the

trait of wonder in it!

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XI.

THE INTERIOR OF A HEART.

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the

clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of

another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger

Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not,

indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread.

Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a

quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this

unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge

than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the

one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the

remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of

sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from

the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be

revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark

treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so

adequately pay the debt of vengeance!

The clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme.

Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all,

less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence—using the

avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning

where it seemed most to punish—had substituted for his black devices.

A revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It

mattered little, for his object, whether celestial, or from what other

region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and

Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost

soul, of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that

he could see and comprehend its every movement. He became,

thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor

minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would

he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was forever on the

rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the

engine;—and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with

sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician’s wand, uprose a grisly

phantom,—uprose a thousand phantoms,—in many shapes, of death, or

more awful shame, all flocking 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 were scholars among them, who had spent more years in

acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than

Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more

profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their

youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind

than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron,

or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion

of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable,

efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were

others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been

elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought,

and etherealized, moreover, by spiritual communications with the

better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced

these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging

to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the

chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it

would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages,

but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s

native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked

Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of

Flame. They would have vainly sought—had they ever dreamed of

seeking—to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of

familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and

indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.

[Illustration: The Virgins of the Church]

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.

Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To

the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed,

had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might

be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It

kept him down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal

attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and

answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so

intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart

vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself,

and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in

gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but

sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them

thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They

fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke,

and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was

sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of

a passion so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to

be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as

their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of

his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were

themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go

heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children, that

their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s holy

grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was

thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass

would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration

tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to

reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value,

that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then,

what was he?—a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed

to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice,

and tell the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black

garments of the priesthood,—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn

my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion, in your

behalf, with the Most High Omniscience,—I, in whose daily life you

discern the sanctity of Enoch,—I, whose footsteps, as you suppose,

leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that shall

come after me may be guided to the regions of the 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,

leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all

that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things

which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery

of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out

of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by

Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the

whole universe is false,—it is impalpable,—it shrinks to nothing

within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a

false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only

truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this

earth, was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled

expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and

wear a face of gayety, 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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XII.

THE MINISTER’S VIGIL.

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually

under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale

reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived

through her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or

scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of

seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits

who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of

the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud

muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same

multitude which had stood as 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 gray of the midnight. But the

town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister

might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden

in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air

would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism,

and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the

expectant audience of to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see

him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet,

wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but

the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul

trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while

fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by

the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own

sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which

invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the

other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor,

miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with

crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to

endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage

strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and

most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one

thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot,

the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of

expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as

if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast,

right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and

there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain.

Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he

shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and

was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the

hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much

misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were

bandying it to and fro.

“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.

“The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!”

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater

power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town

did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry

either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of

witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over

the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through

the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,

uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows

of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood at some distance, on the

line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate

himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a

long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked

unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At

another window of the same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress

Hibbins, the Governor’s sister, also with a lamp, which, even thus far

off, revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She

thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.

Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes

and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night-hags, with

whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady

quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up

among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The

magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness,—into which,

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

doorstep. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute

particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his

existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard;

and that the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him, in a few

moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light drew

nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother

clergyman,—or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as

well as highly valued friend,—the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr.

Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some

dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the

death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to

heaven within that very hour. And now, surrounded, like the saint-like

personages of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him

amid this gloomy night of sin,—as if the departed Governor had left

him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself

the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to

see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates,—now, in short, good

Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted

lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to

Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled,—nay, almost laughed at them,—and then

wondered if he were going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely

muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the

lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly

restrain himself from speaking.

“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I

pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”

Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant, he

believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered

only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to

step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his

feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform.

When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the

minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the

last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although his

mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of

lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole

in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing

stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted

whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.

Morning would break, and find him there. The neighborhood would begin

to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim

twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place

of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go,

knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the

ghost—as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A

dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then—the

morning light still waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in

great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without

pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous

personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of

their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a

nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly

forth, with his King James’s ruff fastened askew; and Mistress

Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and

looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after

her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the

night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out

of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come

the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale’s church, and the young

virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him

in their white bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and

confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with

their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over

their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken

visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the

red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur

Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing

where Hester Prynne had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,

unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of

laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish

laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart,—but he knew not whether

of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute,—he recognized the tones of

little Pearl.

“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he after a moment’s pause; then,

suppressing his voice,—“Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?”

“Yes; it is Hester Prynne!” she replied, in a tone of surprise; and

the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk, along

which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.”

“Whence come you, Hester?” asked the minister. “What sent you hither?”

“I have been watching at a death-bed,” answered Hester Prynne;—“at

Governor Winthrop’s death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe,

and am now going homeward to my dwelling.”

“Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,” said the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale. “Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.

Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!”

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding

little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child’s other

hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a

tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a

torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the

mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his

half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.

“Minister!” whispered little Pearl.

“What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

“Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?”

inquired Pearl.

“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the

new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had

so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he

was already trembling at the conjunction in which—with a strange joy,

nevertheless—he now found himself. “Not so, my child. I shall,

indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not

to-morrow.”

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister

held it fast.

“A moment longer, my child!” said he.

“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and mother’s

hand, to-morrow noontide?”

“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister, “but another time.”

“And what other time?” persisted the child.

“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister,—and, strangely

enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth

impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the

judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But

the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

Pearl laughed again.

[Illustration: “They stood in the noon of that strange splendor”]

But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and

wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those

meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to

waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its

radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud

betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome

of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with

the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is

always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The

wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the

doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about

them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the

wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with

green on either side;—all were visible, but with a singularity of

aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things

of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the

minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the

embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself

a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the

noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that

is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who

belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she

glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its

expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.

Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his

hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric

appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less

regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many

revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword

of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky,

prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded

by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for

good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to

Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously

warned by some spectacle of this 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 colored,

magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it

more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea,

that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful

hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be

deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The

belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that

their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of

peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an

individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the

same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the

symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered

morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had

extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the

firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his

soul’s history and fate!

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and

heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there

the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in

lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at

that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such

shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little

definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in

it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Dimmesdale’s

psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward

to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl

was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at

no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him,

with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his

features, as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new

expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful

then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he

looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,

and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester

Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger

Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there

with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression,

or so intense the minister’s perception of it, that it seemed still to

remain painted on the darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an

effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.

“Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with

terror. “I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!”

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

“I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again.

“Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless

horror of the man!”

“Minister,” said little Pearl, “I can tell thee who he is!”

“Quickly, then, child!” said the minister, bending his ear close to

her lips. “Quickly!—and as low as thou canst whisper.”

Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human

language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing

themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved

any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in

a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the

bewilderment of his mind. The 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

noontide!”

“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 strange light shone out. Come with

me, I beseech you, Reverend Sir; else you will be poorly able to do

Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now, how they trouble the

brain,—these books!—these books! You should study less, good Sir,

and take a little pastime; or these night-whimseys will grow upon

you.”

“I will go home with you,” said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an

ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse

which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most

replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his

lips. Souls, it is said more souls than one, were brought to the truth

by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish

a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter.

But, as he came down the pulpit steps, the gray-bearded sexton met

him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his

own.

“It was found,” said the sexton, “this morning, on the scaffold where

evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take

it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed,

he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs

no glove to cover it!”

“Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister, gravely, but startled

at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost

brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.

“Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”

“And since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle

him without gloves, henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly

smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen

last night?—a great red letter in the sky,—the letter A, which we

interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was

made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there

should be some notice thereof!”

“No,” answered the minister, “I had not heard of it.”

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XIII.

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER.

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was

shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His

nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into

more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even

while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or

had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have

given them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from

all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate

action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to

bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s well-being and

repose. Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once been, her whole

soul was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to

her,—the outcast woman,—for support against his instinctively

discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her

utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to

measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to

herself, Hester saw—or seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility

upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no other,

nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest

of human kind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the

material—had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime,

which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought

along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which

we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had

come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the

scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery,

had long been a familiar object to the towns-people. 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 favor. 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.

[Illustration: Hester in the House of Mourning]

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 labor of her hands,—she was quick to

acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man, whenever benefits

were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little

substance to every demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted

pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to

his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could

have embroidered a monarch’s robe. None so self-devoted as Hester,

when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity,

indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at

once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful

inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble; as if its

gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold

intercourse with her fellow-creatures. There glimmered the embroidered

letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin,

it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in

the sufferer’s hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown

him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming

dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such

emergencies, Hester’s nature showed itself warm and rich; a

well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and

inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was

but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was

self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world’s

heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked

forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such

helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to

sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by

its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong

was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine

came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the

threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward

glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts

of those whom she had served so zealously. Meeting them in the

street, she never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they

were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet

letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility,

that it produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on

the public mind. The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable

of denying common justice, when too strenuously demanded as a right;

but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal

is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.

Interpreting Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature,

society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign

countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, than she

deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer

in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the

people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter

were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning, that

made it a far tougher labor to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless,

their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in

the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost

benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent

position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in

private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her

frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as

the token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and

dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since. “Do you see that

woman with the embroidered badge?” they would say to strangers. “It is

our Hester,—the town’s own Hester, who is so kind to the poor, so

helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!” Then, it is

true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself,

when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to

whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a

fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the

scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom. It

imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk

securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have

kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian

had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it,

but fell harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol—or, rather, of the position in respect to

society that was indicated by it—on the mind of Hester Prynne

herself, was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage

of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had

long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might

have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be

repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a

similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of

her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It

was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had

either been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a

shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in

part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there

seemed to be no longer 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 woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment

become a woman again if there were only the magic touch to effect the

transfiguration. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever

afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be

attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great

measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the

world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl

to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her

position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast

away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for

her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly

emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many

centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings.

Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but

within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the

whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of

ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a

freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the

Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have

held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet

letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited

her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy

guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their

entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her

door.

It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often

conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of

society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the

flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had

little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have

been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history,

hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious

sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She

might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern

tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations

of the Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the

mother’s enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon.

Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to

Hester’s charge the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and

developed amid a host of difficulties. 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 woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns,

it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole

system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the

very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which

has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman

can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position.

Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take

advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have

undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal

essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have

evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of

thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart

chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus, Hester Prynne, whose

heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew

in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable

precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and

ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At

times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not

better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such

futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the

night of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held

up to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice

for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath

which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased

to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had

not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt, that,

whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of

remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that

proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side,

under the semblance of a friend and helper, and had availed himself of

the opportunities thus afforded for tampering with the delicate

springs of Mr. Dimmesdale’s nature. Hester could not but ask herself,

whether there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and

loyalty, on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown into a

position where so much evil was to be foreboded, and nothing

auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact, that

she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker

ruin than had overwhelmed herself, except by acquiescing in Roger

Chillingworth’s scheme of disguise. Under that impulse, she had made

her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched

alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her error, so far as

it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn

trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger

Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin, and half maddened by

the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked together in the

prison-chamber. She had climbed her way, since then, to a higher

point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to

her level, or perhaps below it, by the revenge which he had stooped

for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do

what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he

had so evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One

afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she

beheld the old physician, with a basket on one arm, and a staff in the

other hand, stooping along the ground, in quest of roots and herbs to

concoct his medicines withal.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XIV.

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN.

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play

with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked

awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a

bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the

moist margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, and

peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror

for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool,

with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her

eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other

playmate, invited to take her hand, and run a race with her. But the

visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to

say,—“This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!” And Pearl,

stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom;

while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of

fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician.

“I would speak a word with you,” said she,—“a word that concerns us

much.”

“Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger

Chillingworth?” answered he, raising himself from his stooping

posture. “With all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you

on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and

godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and

whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the

council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the common weal,

yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life,

Hester, I made my entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might

be done forthwith!”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this

badge,” calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it

would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something

that should speak a different purport.”

“Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,” rejoined he. “A woman

must needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her person.

The letter is gayly 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 vigor and

alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man,

calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had

altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching,

almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish

and purpose to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter

played him false, and flickered over his visage so derisively, that

the spectator could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and

anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes; as if the

old man’s soul were on fire, and kept on smouldering duskily within

his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it was blown into a

momentary flame. This he repressed, as speedily as possible, and

strove to look as if nothing of the kind had happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s

faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a

reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy

person had effected such a transformation, by devoting himself, for

seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and

deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures

which he analyzed and gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another

ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.

“What see you in my face,” asked the physician, “that you look at it

so earnestly?”

“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter

enough for it,” answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder

miserable man that I would speak.”

“And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved

the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only

person of whom he could make a confidant. “Not to hide the truth,

Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the

gentleman. So speak freely; and I will make answer.”

“When we last 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. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough! What art can

do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes, and creeps about on

earth, is owing all to me!”

“Better he had died at once!” said Hester Prynne.

“Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!” cried old Roger Chillingworth,

letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. “Better

had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has

suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been

conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him

like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never

made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly

hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking

curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew

not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to

his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be

tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of

remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him

beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!—the

closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!—and

who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst

revenge! Yea, indeed!—he did not err!—there was a fiend at his

elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for

his especial torment!”

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his

hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape,

which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his own image in

a glass. It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at

the interval of years—when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully

revealed to his mind’s eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed

himself as he did now.

“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old

man’s look. “Has he not paid thee all?”

“No!—no!—He has but increased the debt!” answered the physician; and

as he proceeded his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and

subsided into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine

years agone? Even then, I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the

early autumn. But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious,

thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine

own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but

casual to the other,—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.

No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so

rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though

you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others,

craving little for himself,—kind, true, just, and of constant, if not

warm affections? Was I not all this?”

“All this, and more,” said Hester.

“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking into her face, and

permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. “I

have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?”

“It was myself!” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was I, not less than

he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth.

“If that have not avenged me, I can do no more!”

He laid his finger on it, with a smile.

“It has avenged thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

“I judged no less,” said the physician. “And now, what wouldst thou

with me touching this man?”

“I must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern

thee in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not. But

this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin

I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow

or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance

his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I,—whom the scarlet letter has

disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron, entering

into the soul,—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any

longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy

mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him,—no good

for me,—no good for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is

no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!”

“Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!” said Roger Chillingworth, unable

to restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost

majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great

elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than

mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been

wasted in thy nature!”

“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has

transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out

of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for

thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power

that claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for

him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy

maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt wherewith

we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee,

and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at

thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou

reject that priceless benefit?”

“Peace, Hester, peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness.

“It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest

me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains

all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry thou didst

plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark

necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of

typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s

office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as

it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of

gathering herbs.

[Illustration: Mandrake]

[Illustration]

XV.

HESTER AND PEARL.

So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure, with a face that

haunted men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester

Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and

there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his

arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward.

Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic

curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be

blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps,

sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of

herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would

not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his

eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown,

that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that

every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious

and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly

everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather

seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity,

whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would

he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted

spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade,

dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the

climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or

would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier,

the higher he rose towards heaven?

[Illustration: “He gathered herbs here and there”]

“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as she still gazed

after him, “I hate the man!”

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or

lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days,

in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the

seclusion of his study, and sit down in the firelight of their home,

and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in

that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours

among his books might be taken off the scholar’s heart. Such scenes

had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through

the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves

among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could

have been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to

marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she

had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand,

and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt

into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger

Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the

time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy

herself happy by his side.

“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. “He

betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with

it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable

fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch

than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be

reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness,

which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester

ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken?

Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter,

inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance?

The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the

crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on

Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise

have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

“Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”

[Illustration: Pearl on the Sea-Shore]

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for

amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At

first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image

in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined

to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of

impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that

either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better

pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them

with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than

any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered

near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made

prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in

the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line

of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after

it, with winged footsteps, to catch the great snow-flakes ere they

fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds, that fed and fluttered along

the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and,

creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed

remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a

white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and

fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and

gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a

little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl

herself.

Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and

make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the

aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for

devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb,

Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own

bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s.

A letter,—the letter A,—but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The

child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with

strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been

sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then, she heard her mother’s voice, and flitting along as lightly

as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne,

dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her

bosom.

“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green

letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know,

my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast

taught 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 misdemeanors, 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 coloring. But now the idea

came strongly into Hester’s mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable

precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when

she could be made a friend, and 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,—a

sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-respect,—and a

bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to

have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too,

though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavors of

unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the

evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a

noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.

Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet

letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch

of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed

mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of

justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked

propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask,

whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a

purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained

with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly

child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay

cold in her mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help

her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead

nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind, with

as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered

into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her

mother’s hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she

put these searching questions, once, and again, and still a third

time.

“What does the letter mean, mother?—and why dost thou wear it?—and

why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! If this be the

price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.”

Then she spoke aloud.

“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many

things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of

the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the

sake of its gold-thread.”

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been

false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman

of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her;

as recognizing that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some

new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled.

As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three

times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at

supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after

she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief

gleaming in her black eyes.

“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being

awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that

other inquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her

investigations about the scarlet letter:—

“Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his

heart?”

“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an

asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease

me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!”

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XVI.

A FOREST WALK.

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr.

Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences,

the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For

several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing

him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the

habit of taking, along the shores of the peninsula, or on the wooded

hills of the neighboring country. There would have been no scandal,

indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame,

had she visited him in his own study; where many a penitent, ere now,

had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by

the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or

undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that

her conscious heart imputed suspicion where none could have been felt,

and partly that both the minister and she would need the whole wide

world to breathe in, while they talked together,—for all these

reasons, Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy

than beneath the open sky.

At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had

gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian

converts. He would probably return, by a certain hour, in the

afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took

little Pearl,—who was necessarily the companion of all her mother’s

expeditions, however inconvenient her presence,—and set forth.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the peninsula to

the mainland, was no other than a footpath. It straggled onward into

the mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and

stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect

glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester’s mind, it imaged not amiss

the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day

was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly

stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine

might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This

flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long

vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly sportive, at

best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene—withdrew

itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the

drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright.

“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you. It runs

away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your

bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you

here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee

from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!”

“Nor ever will, my child, I hope,” said Hester.

“And why not, mother?” asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the

beginning of her race. “Will not it come of its own accord, when I am

a woman grown?”

“Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and catch the sunshine! It

will soon be gone.”

Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive,

did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of

it, all brightened by its splendor, 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 vigor in

Pearl’s nature, as this never-failing vivacity of spirits; she had not

the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter

days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their

ancestors. Perhaps this too was a disease, and but the reflex of the

wild energy with which Hester had fought against her sorrows, before

Pearl’s birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard,

metallic lustre to the child’s character. She wanted—what some people

want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus

humanize and make her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough

yet for little Pearl.

“Come, my child!” said Hester, looking about her from the spot where

Pearl had stood still in the sunshine. “We will sit down a little way

within the wood, and rest ourselves.”

“I am not aweary, mother,” replied the little girl. “But you may sit

down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile.”

“A story, child!” said Hester. “And about what?”

“O, a story about the Black Man,” answered Pearl, taking hold of her

mother’s gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously,

into her face. “How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with

him,—a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man

offers his book and an iron pen to 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, recognizing a

common superstition of the period.

“It was the old dame in the chimney-corner, at the house where you

watched last night,” said the child. “But she fancied me asleep while

she was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people

had met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on

them. And that ugly-tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And,

mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s

mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest

him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost

thou go to meet him in the night-time?”

“Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother gone?” asked Hester.

“Not that I remember,” said the child. “If thou fearest to leave me in

our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very

gladly go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And

didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?”

“Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?” asked her mother.

“Yes, if thou tellest me all,” answered Pearl.

“Once in my life I met the Black Man!” said her mother. “This scarlet

letter is his mark!”

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to

secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along

the forest track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss;

which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic

pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head

aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had

seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either

side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and

drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great

branches, from time to time, which choked up the current and compelled

it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its

swifter and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of

pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes follow along the

course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its

water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all

traces of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and

here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these

giant trees and bowlders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery

of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its

never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of

the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the

smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the

streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy,

like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without

playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and

events of sombre hue.

“O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!” cried Pearl, after

listening awhile to its talk. “Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit,

and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!”

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the

forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could

not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.

Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed

from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes

shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she

danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.

“What does this sad little brook say, mother?” inquired she.

“If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of

it,” answered her mother, “even as it is telling me of mine! But now,

Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting

aside the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and

leave me to speak with him that comes yonder.”

“Is it the Black Man?” asked Pearl.

“Wilt thou go and play, child?” repeated her mother. “But do not stray

far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call.”

“Yes, mother,” answered Pearl. “But if it be the Black Man, wilt thou

not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his

arm?”

“Go, silly child!” said her mother, impatiently. “It is no Black Man!

Thou canst see him now, through the trees. It is the minister!”

“And so it is!” said the child. “And, mother, he has his hand over his

heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book,

the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it

outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?”

“Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time,”

cried Hester Prynne. “But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear

the babble of the brook.”

The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook,

and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy

voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept

telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that

had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation about something that

was yet to happen—within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl,

who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break off

all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself, therefore,

to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines

that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two

towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained

under the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing

along the path, entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had

cut by the wayside. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a

nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably

characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other

situation where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was

wofully visible, in this intense seclusion of the forest, which of

itself would have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a

listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no reason for taking one step

farther, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could

he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the

nearest tree, and lie there passive, forevermore. 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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XVII.

THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER.

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by, before Hester

Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At

length, she succeeded.

“Arthur Dimmesdale!” she said, faintly at first; then louder, but

hoarsely. “Arthur Dimmesdale!”

“Who speaks?” answered the minister.

Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by

surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses.

Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he

indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so

sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the

clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he

knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be, that his

pathway through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that had stolen

out from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

“Hester! Hester Prynne!” said he. “Is it thou? Art thou in life?”

“Even so!” she answered. “In such life as has been mine these seven

years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?”

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and

bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they

meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the

world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately

connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in

mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the

companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at

the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves;

because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and

revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does,

except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the

mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and,

as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put

forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester

Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the

interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same

sphere.

Without a word more spoken,—neither he nor she assuming the guidance,

but with an unexpressed consent,—they glided back into the shadow of

the woods, whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss

where she and Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to

speak, it was, at first, only to utter remarks and inquiries such as

any two acquaintance might have made, about the gloomy sky, the

threatening storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus they went

onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were

brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and

circumstances, they needed something slight and casual to run before,

and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts

might be led across the threshold.

After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne’s.

“Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?”

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

“Hast thou?” she asked.

“None!—nothing but despair!” he answered. “What else could I look

for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an

atheist,—a man devoid of conscience,—a wretch with coarse and brutal

instincts,—I might have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I never

should have lost it! But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of

good capacity there originally was in me, all of God’s gifts that were

the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I

am most miserable!”

“The people reverence thee,” said Hester. “And surely thou workest

good among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?”

“More misery, Hester!—only the more misery!” answered the clergyman,

with a bitter smile. “As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I

have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined

soul, like mine, effect towards the redemption of other souls?—or a

polluted soul towards their purification? And as for the people’s

reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou

deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand up in my pulpit, and

meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven

were beaming from it!—must see my flock hungry for the truth, and

listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!—and

then look inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolize?

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast

between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!”

“You wrong yourself in this,” said Hester, gently. “You have deeply

and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long

past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems

in people’s eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and

witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?”

“No, Hester, no!” replied the clergyman. “There is no substance in it!

It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had

enough! Of penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago

have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself

to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you,

Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine

burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the

torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes

me for what I am! Had I one friend,—or were it my worst enemy!—to

whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily

betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my

soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would

save me! But, now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!”

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,

uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his

words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to

interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke.

“Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,” said she, “with whom

to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!”—Again she

hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.—“Thou hast long

had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!”

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at

his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.

“Ha! What sayest thou!” cried he. “An enemy! And under mine own roof!

What mean you?”

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she

was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so

many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose

purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of

his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was

enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as

Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive

to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own

trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to

herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his

vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and

invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not,

that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,—the secret poison

of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,—and his authorized

interference, as a physician, with the minister’s physical and

spiritual infirmities,—that these bad opportunities had been turned

to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer’s conscience had

been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to

cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual

being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and

hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which

madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,—nay, why

should we not speak it?—still so passionately loved! Hester felt that

the sacrifice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, as she

had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely

preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to

choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess,

she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died there,

at Arthur Dimmesdale’s feet.

“O Arthur,” cried she, “forgive me! In all things else, I have striven

to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and

did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good,—thy

life,—thy fame,—were put in question! Then I consented to a

deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the

other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!—the

physician!—he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—he was my

husband!”

[Illustration: “Wilt thou yet forgive me?”]

The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of

passion, which—intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher,

purer, softer qualities—was, in fact, the portion of him which the

Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was

there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For

the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his

character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its

lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He

sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.

“I might have known it,” murmured he. “I did know it! Was not the

secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight

of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not

understand? O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the

horror of this thing! And the shame!—the indelicacy!—the horrible

ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye

that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!

I cannot forgive thee!”

“Thou shalt forgive me!” cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen

leaves beside him. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”

With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him,

and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek

rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but

strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should

look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her,—for

seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,—and still she

bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven,

likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of

this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could

not bear and live!

“Wilt thou yet forgive me?” she repeated, over and over again. “Wilt

thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?”

“I do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister, at length, with a

deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. “I freely

forgive you now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the

worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted

priest! That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has

violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I,

Hester, never did so!”

“Never, never!” whispered she. “What we did had a consecration of its

own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?”

“Hush, Hester!” said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. “No; I

have not forgotten!”

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the

mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier

hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending,

and darkening ever, as it stole along;—and yet it enclosed a charm

that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and,

after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and

creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were

tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned

dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat

beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come.

And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led

backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the

burden of her ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his

good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had

ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen

only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of

the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale,

false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

“Hester,” cried he, “here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows

your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to

keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?”

“There is a strange secrecy in his nature,” replied Hester,

thoughtfully; “and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of

his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He

will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”

“And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this

deadly enemy?” exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself,

and pressing his hand nervously against his heart,—a gesture that had

grown involuntary with him.

“Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!”

“Thou must dwell no longer with this man,” said Hester, slowly and

firmly. “Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!”

“It were far worse than death!” replied the minister. “But how to

avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these

withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he

was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?”

“Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!” said Hester, with the tears

gushing into her eyes. “Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no

other cause!”

“The judgment of God is on me,” answered the conscience-stricken

priest. “It is too mighty for me to struggle with!”

“Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester, “hadst thou but the

strength to take advantage of it.”

“Be thou strong for me!” answered he. “Advise me what to do.”

“Is the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her

deep eyes on the minister’s, and instinctively exercising a magnetic

power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold

itself erect. “Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder

town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as

lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward

to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too. Deeper it goes,

and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every

step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no

vestige of the white man’s tread. There thou art free! So brief a

journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most

wretched, to one where thou 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 realize a dream. “I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinful as

I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly

existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my

own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare

not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is

death and dishonor, 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!”

“O Hester!” cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,

kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, “thou tellest of

running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must

die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture

into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone!”

It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He

lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his

reach.

He repeated the word.

“Alone, Hester!”

“Thou shalt not go alone!” answered she, in a deep whisper.

Then, all was spoken!

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XVIII.

A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope

and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of

horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but

dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for

so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had

habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether

foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,

in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the

untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a

colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had

their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely

as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from

this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever

priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly

more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the

judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.

The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The

scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared

not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her

teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but

taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience

calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;

although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one

of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of

principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had

watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,—for those it

was easy to arrange,—but each breath of emotion, and his every

thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that

day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its

principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his

order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who

kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting

of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the

line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven

years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation

for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more

to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None;

unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and

exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the

very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed

criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard

to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death

and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,

finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,

sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and

sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom

which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken,

that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is

never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded;

so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and

might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in

preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still

the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that

would win over again his unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it

suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

“If, in all these past seven years,” thought he, “I could recall one

instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that

earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now,—since I am irrevocably

doomed,—wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the

condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a

better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer

prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her

companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,—so tender to soothe! O

Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me!”

“Thou wilt go!” said Hester, calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its

flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the

exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of

his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an

unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it

were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than

throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth.

Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the

devotional in his mood.

“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself. “Methought the

germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem

to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down

upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with

new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the

better life! Why did we not find it sooner?”

“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone!

Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo

it all, and make it as it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter,

and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the

withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the

stream. With a hand’s breadth farther flight it would have fallen into

the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry

onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring

about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost

jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be

haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and

unaccountable misfortune.

[Illustration: A Gleam of Sunshine]

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 the thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen

her,—yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She

is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her

dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her.”

“Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?” asked the

minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children,

because they often show a distrust,—a backwardness to be familiar

with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!”

“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But she will love thee

dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl!

Pearl!”

“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in

a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook.

So thou thinkest the child will love me?”

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some

distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled

vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of

boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or

distinct,—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit,—as the

splendor 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 flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness

hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a

brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented

of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A

pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and

uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the

lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or

merriment,—for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little

personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,—so he

chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a

last year’s nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox,

startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked

inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal

off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,—but here

the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,—came up, and smelt of

Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.

The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild

things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the

human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the

settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The flowers appeared to know

it; and one and another whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with

me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—and, to please

them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and

some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before

her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and

became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in

closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl

adorned herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly

back.

Slowly; for she saw the clergyman.

[Illustration]

XIX.

THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE.

“Thou wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the

minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her

beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple

flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies,

in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid

child! But I know whose brow she has!”

“Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet

smile, “that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath

caused me many an alarm? Methought—O Hester, what a thought is that,

and how terrible to dread it!—that my own features were partly

repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them!

But she is mostly thine!”

“No, no! Not mostly!” answered the mother, with a tender smile. “A

little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child

she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those

wild-flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left

in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us.”

It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before

experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her

was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the

world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which

was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—all written in

this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—had there been a prophet or

magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the

oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could

they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were

conjoined, when they beheld at once the material union, and the

spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally

together? Thoughts like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they

did not acknowledge or define—threw an awe about the child, as she

came onward.

“Let her see nothing strange—no passion nor eagerness—in thy way of

accosting her,” whispered Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic

little elf, sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant of emotion,

when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the

child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!”

“Thou canst not think,” said the minister, glancing aside at Hester

Prynne, “how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But,

in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be

familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear,

nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even

little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl,

twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first

time,—thou 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 farther 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 was both truth and error in the impression; the child and

mother were estranged, but through Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s. Since

the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted

within the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the aspect

of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her

wonted place, and hardly knew where she was.

“I have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive minister, “that this

brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never

meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends

of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream?

Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my

nerves.”

“Come, dearest child!” said Hester, encouragingly, and stretching out

both her arms. “How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish

before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also.

Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as thy mother alone

could give thee! Leap across the brook, and come to us. Thou canst

leap like a young deer!”

[Illustration: The Child at the Brook-Side]

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 behavior on the elf-child’s part at other

seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. “Leap

across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to

thee!”

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother’s threats, any more than

mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,

gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most

extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with

piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that,

alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as

if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and

encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath of

Pearl’s image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its

foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing

its small forefinger at Hester’s bosom!

“I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester to the clergyman, and

turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and

annoyance. “Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the

accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl

misses something which she has always seen me wear!”

“I pray you,” answered the minister, “if thou hast any means of

pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath

of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins,” added he, attempting to

smile, “I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this

passion in a child. In Pearl’s young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch,

it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me!”

Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her

cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy

sigh; while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a

deadly pallor.

“Pearl,” said she, sadly, “look down at thy feet! There!—before

thee!—on the hither side of the brook!”

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there lay the

scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream, that the gold

embroidery was reflected in it.

“Bring it hither!” said Hester.

“Come thou and take it up!” answered Pearl.

“Was ever such a child!” observed Hester, aside to the minister. “O, I

have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as

regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little

longer,—only a few days longer,—until we shall have left this

region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of.

The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand,

and swallow it up forever!”

With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the

scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a

moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there

was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back

this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into

infinite space!—she had drawn an hour’s free breath!—and here again

was the scarlet misery, glittering on the old spot! So it ever is,

whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the

character of doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her

hair, and confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering

spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her

womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to

fall across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl.

“Dost thou know thy mother now, child?” asked she, reproachfully, but

with a subdued tone. “Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy

mother, now that she has her shame upon her,—now that she is sad?”

“Yes; now I will!” answered the child, bounding across the brook, and

clasping Hester in her arms. “Now thou art my mother indeed! And I am

thy little Pearl!”

In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down her

mother’s head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then—by a

kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever

comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish—Pearl put up

her mouth, and kissed the scarlet letter too!

“That was not kind!” said Hester. “When thou hast shown me a little

love, thou mockest me!”

“Why doth the minister sit yonder?” asked Pearl.

“He waits to welcome thee,” replied her mother. “Come thou, and

entreat his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy

mother too. Wilt thou not love him? Come! he longs to greet thee!”

“Doth he love us?” said Pearl, looking up, with acute intelligence,

into her mother’s face. “Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we

three together, into the town?”

“Not now, dear child,” answered Hester. “But in days to come he will

walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our

own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many

things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not?”

“And will he always keep his hand over his heart?” inquired Pearl.

“Foolish child, what a question is that!” exclaimed her mother. “Come

and ask his blessing!”

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with

every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice

of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It

was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to

him, hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of

which, ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety,

and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different

aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The

minister—painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a

talisman to admit him into the child’s kindlier regards—bent forward,

and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her

mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her

forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off, and diffused

through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart,

silently watching Hester and the clergyman; while they talked

together, and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new

position, and the purposes soon to be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be

left a solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their

multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there,

and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this

other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already

overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with

not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XX.

THE MINISTER IN A MAZE.

As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little

Pearl, he threw a backward glance; half expecting that he should

discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother

and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great

a vicissitude in his life could not at once be received as real. But

there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the

tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and

which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two

fated ones, with earth’s heaviest burden on them, might there sit down

together, and find a single hour’s rest and solace. And there was

Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook,—now that

the intrusive third person was gone,—and taking her old place by her

mother’s side. So the minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed!

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of

impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and

more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had

sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them,

that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more

eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England, or all

America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few

settlements of Europeans, scattered thinly along the seaboard. Not to

speak of the clergyman’s health, so inadequate to sustain the

hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his

entire development, would secure him a home only in the midst of

civilization and refinement; the higher the state, the more delicately

adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened

that a ship lay in the harbor; one of those questionable cruisers,

frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the

deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility

of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main,

and, within three days’ time, would sail for Bristol. Hester

Prynne—whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had

brought her acquainted with the captain and crew—could take upon

herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child, with all

the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the

precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would

probably be on the fourth day from the present. “That is most

fortunate!” he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate, we hesitate to reveal.

Nevertheless,—to hold nothing back from the reader,—it was because,

on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election

Sermon; and, as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life

of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more

suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. “At

least, they shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I

leave no public duty unperformed, nor ill performed!” Sad, indeed,

that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister’s

should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have,

worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak;

no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease,

that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his

character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to

himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting

bewildered as to which may be the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale’s feelings, as he returned from his

interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and

hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods

seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less

trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward

journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself

through the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the

hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track,

with an unweariable activity that astonished him. He could not but

recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath, he had

toiled over the same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the

town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar

objects that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one,

nor two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.

There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered

it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude

of gable-peaks, and a weathercock at every point where his memory

suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately

obtrusive sense of change. The same was true as regarded the

acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human

life, about the little town. They looked neither older nor younger

now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping

babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to

describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he

had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister’s

deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar

impression struck him most remarkably, as he passed under the walls of

his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar,

an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale’s mind vibrated between two ideas;

either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was

merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no

external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator

of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had

operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister’s

own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them, had

wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore; but

the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to

the friends who greeted him,—“I am not the man for whom you take me!

I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a

mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister,

and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy,

pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off

garment!” His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with

him,—“Thou art thyself the man!”—but the error would have been their

own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other

evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In

truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in

that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now

communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step

he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a

sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite

of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which

opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The

good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal

privilege, which his venerable age, his upright and holy character,

and his station in the Church, entitled him to use; and, conjoined

with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister’s

professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more

beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport

with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower

social rank, and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now,

during a conversation of some two or three moments between the

Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon,

it was only by the most careful self-control that the former could

refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into

his mind, respecting the communion supper. He absolutely trembled and

turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself, in utterance

of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing,

without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his

heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified

old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister’s

impiety!

Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street,

the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of

his church; a most pious and exemplary old dame; poor, widowed,

lonely, and with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead

husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a

burial-ground is full of storied gravestones. Yet all this, which

would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy

to her devout old soul, by religious consolations and the truths of

Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continually for more than

thirty years. And, since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the

good grandam’s chief earthly comfort—which, unless it had been

likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all—was to meet

her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with

a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from his

beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on

this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman’s

ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could

recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy,

and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the

immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind

would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at

once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion. What he

really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recollect.

There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which

failed to impart any distinct idea to the good widow’s comprehension,

or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own. Assuredly,

as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine

gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city

on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.

Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church-member, he

met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won—and

won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s own sermon, on the Sabbath after

his vigil—to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the

heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark

around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She

was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister

knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity

of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting

to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan,

that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her

mother’s side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted,

or—shall we not rather say?—this lost and desperate man. As she drew

nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass and

drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to

blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense

of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the

minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one

wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So—with a

mightier struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak

before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition,

and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She

ransacked her conscience,—which was full of harmless little matters,

like her pocket or her work-bag,—and took herself to task, poor

thing! for a thousand imaginary faults; and went about her household

duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.

Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last

temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and

almost as horrible. It was,—we blush to tell it,—it was to stop

short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of

little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun

to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met

a drunken seaman, one of the ship’s crew from the Spanish Main. And,

here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor

Mr. Dimmesdale longed, at least, to shake hands with the tarry

blackguard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as

dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid,

satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better

principle as partly his natural good taste, and still more his

buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him safely through

the latter crisis.

“What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?” cried the minister to

himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand

against his forehead. “Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the

fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with

my blood? And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting

the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination

can conceive?”

At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with

himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins,

the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a

very grand appearance; having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of

velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Ann

Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this

last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder.

Whether the witch had read the minister’s thoughts, or no, she came to

a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily,

and—though little given to converse with clergymen—began a

conversation.

“So, reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest,” observed

the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. “The next time, I

pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear

you company. Without taking overmuch upon myself, my good word will go

far towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder

potentate you wot of!”

“I profess, madam,” answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance,

such as the lady’s rank demanded, and his own good-breeding made

imperative,—“I profess, on my conscience and character, that I am

utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words! I went not

into the forest to seek a potentate; neither do I, at any future time,

design a visit thither, with a view to gaining the favor of such a

personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of

mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious

souls he hath won from heathendom!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high

head-dress at the minister. “Well, well, we must needs talk thus in

the daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and

in the forest, we shall have other talk together!”

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her

head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognize a secret

intimacy of connection.

“Have I then sold myself,” thought the minister, “to the fiend whom,

if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen

for her prince and master!”

The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by

a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself, with deliberate choice,

as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the

infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused

throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses,

and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn,

bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule

of whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt, even while they

frightened him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it

were a real incident, did but show his sympathy and fellowship with

wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.

He had, by this time, reached his dwelling, on the edge of the

burial-ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study.

The minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first

betraying himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked

eccentricities to which he had been continually impelled while passing

through the streets. He entered the accustomed room, and looked around

him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried

comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had

haunted him throughout his walk from the forest-dell into the town,

and thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here, gone through

fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here, striven to pray;

here, borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in its

rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to him, and

God’s voice through all! There, on the table, with the inky pen beside

it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst,

where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page, two days

before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked

minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far

into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this

former self with scornful, pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That

self was gone. Another man had returned out of the forest; a wiser

one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the

former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that!

While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the

study, and the minister said, “Come in!”—not wholly devoid of an idea

that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger

Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood, white and speechless,

with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other spread upon his

breast.

“Welcome home, reverend Sir,” said the physician. “And how found you

that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear Sir, you look

pale; as if the travel through the wilderness had been too sore for

you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to

preach your Election Sermon?”

“Nay, I think not so,” rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. “My

journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air

which I have breathed, have done me good, after so long confinement in

my study. I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician,

good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand.”

All this time, Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with

the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But,

in spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the

old man’s knowledge, or, at least, his confident suspicion, with

respect to his own interview with Hester Prynne. The physician knew

then, that, in the minister’s regard, he was no longer a trusted

friend, but his bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear

natural that a part of it should be expressed. It is singular,

however, how long a time often passes before words embody things; and

with what security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject,

may approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus,

the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would

touch, in express words, upon the real position which they sustained

towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep

frightfully near the secret.

“Were it not better,” said he, “that you use my poor skill to-night?

Verily, dear Sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous

for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great

things from you; apprehending that another year may come about, and

find their pastor gone.”

“Yea, to another world,” replied the minister, with pious resignation.

“Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think

to tarry with my flock through the flitting seasons of another year!

But, touching your medicine, kind Sir, in my present frame of body, I

need it not.”

“I joy to hear it,” answered the physician. “It may be that my

remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect.

Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England’s gratitude, could

I achieve this cure!”

“I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend,” said the Reverend

Mr. Dimmesdale, with a solemn smile. “I thank you, and can but requite

your good deeds with my prayers.”

“A good man’s prayers are golden recompense!” rejoined old Roger

Chillingworth, as he took his leave. “Yea, they are the current gold

coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint-mark on them!”

Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and

requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous

appetite. Then, flinging the already written pages of the Election

Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with

such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself

inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the

grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as

he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved

forever, 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!

[Illustration]

XXI.

THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.

Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to

receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and

little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with

the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in

considerable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures,

whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the

forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the

colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years

past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by

its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had

the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline;

while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight

indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own

illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the towns-people, showed

the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was

like a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s

features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was

actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed

out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen

before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some

preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and

have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance

and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after

sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as

a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to

endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and

voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a

kind of triumph. “Look your last on the scarlet letter and its

wearer!”—the people’s victim and life-long bond-slave, as they

fancied her, might say to them. “Yet a little while, and she will be

beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean

will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn

upon her bosom!” Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be

assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in

Hester’s mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom

from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.

Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long,

breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly

all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of

life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich,

delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker; or else

leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness

wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest

potency.

Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossible

to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to

the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so

delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child’s apparel,

was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in

imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester’s simple robe. The

dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or

inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no

more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a

butterfly’s wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright

flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea

with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain

singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so

much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the

varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children

have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them;

always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of

whatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was

the gem on her mother’s unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of

her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble

passiveness of Hester’s brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather

than walk by her mother’s side. She broke continually into shouts of a

wild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached

the market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the

stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like

the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than the

centre of a town’s business.

“Why, what is this, mother?” cried she. “Wherefore have all the people

left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See,

there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his

Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any

kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the

old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother?”

“He remembers thee a little babe, my child,” answered Hester.

“He should not nod and smile at me, for all that,—the black, grim,

ugly-eyed old man!” said Pearl. “He may nod at thee, if he will; for

thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see,

mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and

sailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-place?”

“They wait to see the procession pass,” said Hester. “For the Governor

and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great

people and good people, with the music and the soldiers marching

before them.”

“And will the minister be there?” asked Pearl. “And will he hold out

both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the

brook-side?”

“He will be there, child,” answered her mother. “But he will not greet

thee to-day; nor must thou greet him.”

“What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly

to herself. “In the dark night-time he calls us to him, and holds thy

hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. And

in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip

of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he

kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it

off! But here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us

not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand

always over his heart!”

“Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things,” said her

mother. “Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see

how cheery is 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

splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had

beheld in proud old London,—we will not say at a royal coronation,

but at a Lord Mayor’s show,—might be traced in the customs which our

forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of

magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth—the

statesman, the priest, and the soldier—deemed it a duty then to

assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with

antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social

eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people’s

eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a

government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in

relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of

rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece

and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the

applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the

England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James;—no rude shows of a

theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor

gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks

of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with

jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their

appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such

professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been

sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the

general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,

the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but

widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had

witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the

village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive

on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were

essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the 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

favorably, 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 gayety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint

was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet

enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians—in their

savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,

red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow

and stone-headed spear—stood apart, with countenances of inflexible

gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild

as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the

scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some

mariners,—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish

Main,—who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They

were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an

immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the

waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and

sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From

beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even

in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They

transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were

binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle’s very nose,

although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and

quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitæ from

pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around

them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,

rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,

not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds

on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be

arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for

instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavorable 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 clamor and rude deportment of

these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor

animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,

the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and

familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.

The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as

apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a

profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which

was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.

There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,

by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display

than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this

face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without

undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring

fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As

regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to

the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship

strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach

the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,

and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever

Hester stood, a small vacant area—a sort of magic circle—had formed

itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one

another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to

intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the

scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,

and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,

withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered

a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together

without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne’s

repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for

rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result

of scandal than herself.

“So, mistress,” said the mariner, “I must bid the steward make ready

one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or

ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship’s surgeon and this other

doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as

there is a lot of apothecary’s stuff aboard, which I traded for with a

Spanish vessel.”

“What mean you?” inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to

appear. “Have you another passenger?”

“Why, know you not,” cried the shipmaster, “that this physician

here—Chillingworth, he calls himself—is minded to try my cabin-fare

with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of

your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,—he that

is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers!”

[Illustration: Chillingworth,—“Smile with a sinister meaning”]

“They know each other well, indeed,” replied Hester, with a mien of

calmness, though in the utmost consternation. “They have long dwelt

together.”

Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at

that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in

the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile

which—across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk

and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the

crowd—conveyed secret and fearful meaning.

[Illustration]

XXII.

THE PROCESSION.

Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider

what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of

affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a

contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of

magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where,

in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since

observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election

Sermon.

[Illustration: New England Worthies]

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 armor 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 honorable 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 demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the

warrior’s haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age

when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the

massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a

great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the

quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at

all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,

in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for

good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the

English settler on these rude shores—having left king, nobles, and

all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and

necessity of reverence were strong in him—bestowed it on the white

hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid

wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and

weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the

general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,

therefore,—Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their

compeers,—who were elevated to power by the early choice of the

people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a

ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had

fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril,

stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a

tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well

represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical

development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of

natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been

ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into

the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign.

Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently

distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the

anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in

which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political

life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question—it offered

inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the

community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even

political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the

grasp of a successful priest.

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since

Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he

exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he

kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as

at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest

ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed,

his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and

imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration

of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of

earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive

temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that

swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.

Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned

whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body,

moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?

Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural

activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon

to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing,

of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble

frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting

it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown

morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which

they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many

more.

Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary

influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless

that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her

reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass

between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of

solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,

sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk

with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known

each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,

moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with

the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable

in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his

unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit

sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,

vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the

clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,

that she could scarcely forgive him,—least of all now, when the heavy

footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,

nearer!—for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their

mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold

hands, and found him not.

Pearl either saw and responded to her mother’s feelings, or herself

felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the

minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,

fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.

When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester’s face.

“Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed me by the

brook?”

“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must

not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the

forest.”

“I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked,” continued

the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,

before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.

What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his

hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me be gone?”

“What should he say, Pearl,” answered Hester, “save that it was no

time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?

Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!”

Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,

was expressed by a person whose eccentricities—or insanity, as we

should term it—led her to do what few of the towns-people would have

ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet

letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great

magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of

rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the

procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently

cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in

all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the

crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her

garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in

conjunction with Hester Prynne,—kindly as so many now felt towards

the latter,—the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled, and

caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which

the two women stood.

“Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it!” whispered the old

lady, confidentially, to Hester. “Yonder divine man! That saint on

earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as—I must needs say—he

really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would

think how little while it is since he went forth out of his

study,—chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I

warrant,—to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that

means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe

him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the

music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was

fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard

changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the

world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he

was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path?”

“Madam, I know not of what you speak,” answered Hester Prynne, feeling

Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and

awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal

connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil

One. “It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister