XVIII.  A Flood of Sunshine


Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which
hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and
a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely
hinted at, but dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity,
and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from
society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation
as was altogether foreign to the clergyman.  She had wandered,
without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of
which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their
fate.  Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods.  For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more
reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the
church.  The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set
her free.  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread.  Shame, Despair, Solitude!  These had
been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her
strong, but taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so
fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.  But this
had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts--for those it was easy to arrange--but
each breath of emotion, and his every thought.  At the head of
the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was
only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and
even its prejudices.  As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in.  As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the
fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer
within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole
seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a
preparation for this very hour.  But Arthur Dimmesdale!  Were such
a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation
of his crime?  None; unless it avail him somewhat that he was
broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was
darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it;
that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a
hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance;
that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and
the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this
poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick,
miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy
doom which he was now expiating.  And be the stern and sad truth
spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human
soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired.  It may be watched
and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again
into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults,
select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had
formerly succeeded.  But there is still the ruined wall, and near
it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.  Let it
suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall
one instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake
of that earnest of Heaven's mercy.  But now--since I am
irrevocably doomed--wherefore should I not snatch the solace
allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution?  Or, if
this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me,
I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it!  Neither can
I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she
to sustain--so tender to soothe!  O Thou to whom I dare not lift
mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?"

"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast.  It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the
dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere
of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region.  His spirit
rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect
of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him
grovelling on the earth.  Of a deeply religious temperament,
there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.

"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself.
"Methought the germ of it was dead in me!  Oh, Hester, thou art
my better angel!  I seem to have flung myself--sick, sin-stained,
and sorrow-blackened--down upon these forest leaves, and to have
risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that
hath been merciful!  This is already the better life!  Why did we
not find it sooner?"

"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne.  "The past is
gone!  Wherefore should we linger upon it now?  See!  With this
symbol I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!"

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet
letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance
among the withered leaves.  The mystic token alighted on the
hither verge of the stream.  With a hand's-breadth further
flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have given the
little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the
unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about.  But
there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,
which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the
burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit.  O
exquisite relief!  She had not known the weight until she felt
the freedom!  By another impulse, she took off the formal cap
that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders,
dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features.
There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood.  A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek,
that had been long so pale.  Her sex, her youth, and the whole
richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the
irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope,
and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this
hour.  And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the
effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their
sorrow.  All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth
burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure
forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the
solemn trees.  The objects that had made a shadow hitherto,
embodied the brightness now.  The course of the little brook
might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of
mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by
higher truth--with the bliss of these two spirits!  Love, whether
newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always
create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that
it overflows upon the outward world.  Had the forest still kept
its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and
bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

"Thou must know Pearl!" said she.  "Our little Pearl!  Thou hast
seen her--yes, I know it!--but thou wilt see her now with other
eyes.  She is a strange child!  I hardly comprehend her!  But thou
wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal
with her!"

"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily.  "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust--a backwardness to be
familiar with me.  I have even been afraid of little Pearl!"

"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother.  "But she will love
thee dearly, and thou her.  She is not far off.  I will call her.
Pearl!  Pearl!"

"I see the child," observed the minister.  "Yonder she is,
standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other
side of the brook.  So thou thinkest the child will love me?"

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at
some distance, as the minister had described her, like a
bright-apparelled vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her
through an arch of boughs.  The ray quivered to and fro, making
her figure dim or distinct--now like a real child, now like a
child's spirit--as the splendour went and came again.  She heard
her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother
sat talking with the clergyman.  The great black forest--stern as
it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of
the world into its bosom--became the playmate of the lonely
infant, as well as it knew how.  Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her.  It offered her the
partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but
ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon
the withered leaves.  These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with
their wild flavour.  The small denizens of the wilderness hardly
took pains to move out of her path.  A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon
repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to
be afraid.  A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to
come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm.
A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree,
chattered either in anger or merriment--for the squirrel is such
a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to
distinguish between his moods--so he chattered at the child, and
flung down a nut upon her head.  It was a last year's nut, and
already gnawed by his sharp tooth.  A fox, startled from his
sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively
at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or
renew his nap on the same spot.  A wolf, it is said--but here the
tale has surely lapsed into the improbable--came up and smelt of
Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her
hand.  The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a
kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of
the settlement, or in her mother's cottage.  The Bowers appeared
to know it, and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with
me!"--and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and
anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green,
which the old trees held down before her eyes.  With these she
decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph
child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest
sympathy with the antique wood.  In such guise had Pearl adorned
herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.

Slowly--for she saw the clergyman!

XIX.  The Child at the Brookside


"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and
the minister sat watching little Pearl.  "Dost thou not think her
beautiful?  And see with what natural skill she has made those
simple flowers adorn her!  Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds,
and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better!
She is a splendid child!  But I know whose brow she has!"

"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an
unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at
thy side, hath caused me many an alarm?  Methought--oh, Hester,
what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!--that my
own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly
that the world might see them!  But she is mostly thine!"

"No, no!  Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile.
"A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace
whose child she is.  But how strangely beautiful she looks with
those wild flowers in her hair!  It is as if one of the fairies,
whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet
us."

It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance.  In
her was visible the tie that united them.  She had been offered
to the world, these seven past years, as the living
hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly
sought to hide--all written in this symbol--all plainly
manifest--had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read
the character of flame!  And Pearl was the oneness of their
being.  Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt
that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined
when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual
idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together;
thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which they did
not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child as she
came onward.

"Let her see nothing strange--no passion or eagerness--in thy
way of accosting her," whispered Hester.  "Our Pearl is a fitful
and fantastic little elf sometimes.  Especially she is generally
intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the
why and wherefore.  But the child hath strong affections!  She
loves me, and will love thee!"

"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it!  But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me.  They will not climb my knee,
nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart,
and eye me strangely.  Even little babes, when I take them in my
arms, weep bitterly.  Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime,
hath been kind to me!  The first time--thou knowest it well!  The
last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder
stern old Governor."

"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!"
answered the mother.  "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing.  She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon
learn to love thee!"

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and
stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the
clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk
waiting to receive her.  Just where she had paused, the brook
chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a
perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and
wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the
reality.  This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself.  It was strange, the way in which
Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim
medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified
with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a
certain sympathy.  In the brook beneath stood another
child--another and the same--with likewise its ray of golden
light.  Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing
manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her lonely
ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in
which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.

There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's.
Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been
admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so
modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where
she was.

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that
this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou
canst never meet thy Pearl again.  Or is she an elfish spirit,
who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to
cross a running stream?  Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves."

"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching
out both her arms.  "How slow thou art!  When hast thou been so
sluggish before now?  Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy
friend also.  Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward as
thy mother alone could give thee!  Leap across the brook and come
to us.  Thou canst leap like a young deer!"

Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook.  Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another.  For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand--with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary--stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched
out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast.  And beneath, in the
mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny
image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.

"Thou strange child!  why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed
Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on
her brow--the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it.  As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture.  In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.

"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester
Prynne, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the
elf-child's part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a
more seemly deportment now.  "Leap across the brook, naughty
child, and run hither!  Else I must come to thee!"

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more
than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit
of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions.  She accompanied
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods
reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she was in her
childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden
multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's
image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's bosom.

"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman,
and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her
trouble and annoyance, "Children will not abide any, the
slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are
daily before their eyes.  Pearl misses something that she has
always seen me wear!"

"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith!  Save it were the cankered
wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he,
attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner
encounter than this passion in a child.  In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect.  Pacify
her if thou lovest me!"

Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy
sigh, while, even before she had time to speak, the blush
yielded to a deadly pallor.

"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet!  There!--before
thee!--on the hither side of the brook!"

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay
the scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that
the gold embroidery was reflected in it.

"Bring it hither!" said Hester.

"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.

"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister.
"Oh, I have much to tell thee about her!  But, in very truth, she
is right as regards this hateful token.  I must bear its torture
yet a little longer--only a few days longer--until we shall have
left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we
have dreamed of.  The forest cannot hide it!  The mid-ocean shall
take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!"

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took
up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom.
Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it
in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her
as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of
fate.  She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an
hour's free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery
glittering on the old spot!  So it ever is, whether thus typified
or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of
doom.  Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and
confined them beneath her cap.  As if there were a withering
spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of
her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow
seemed to fall across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl.

"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she,
reproachfully, but with a subdued tone.  "Wilt thou come across
the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon
her--now that she is sad?"

"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the
brook, and clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother
indeed! and I am thy little Pearl!"

In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew
down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks.
But then--by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child
to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb
of anguish--Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet
letter, too.

"That was not kind!" said Hester.  "When thou hast shown me a
little love, thou mockest me!"

"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.

"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother.  "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing!  He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves
thy mother, too.  Wilt thou not love him?  Come he longs to greet
thee!"

"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute
intelligence into her mother's face.  "Will he go back with us,
hand in hand, we three together, into the town?"

"Not now, my child," answered Hester.  "But in days to come he
will walk hand in hand with us.  We will have a home and fireside
of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach
thee many things, and love thee dearly.  Thou wilt love him--wilt
thou not?"

"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired
Pearl.

"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive
with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from
whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no
favour to the clergyman.  It was only by an exertion of force
that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and
manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since
her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could
transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all.  The
minister--painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might
prove a talisman to admit him into the child's kindlier
regards--bent forward, and impressed one on her brow.  Hereupon,
Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook,
stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome
kiss was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of
the gliding water.  She then remained apart, silently watching
Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together and made
such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and
the purposes soon to be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close.  The dell
was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which,
with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had
passed there, and no mortal be the wiser.  And the melancholy
brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its
little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept
up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone
than for ages heretofore.

XX.  The Minister in a Maze


As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little
Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should
discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the
mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the
woods.  So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be
received as real.  But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe,
still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had
overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since
been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with
earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together,
and find a single hour's rest and solace.  And there was Pearl,
too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook--now that the
intrusive third person was gone--and taking her old place by her
mother's side.  So the minister had not fallen asleep and
dreamed!

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity
of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he
recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and
himself had sketched for their departure.  It had been determined
between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities,
offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the
wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an
Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered
thinly along the sea-board.  Not to speak of the clergyman's
health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life,
his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would
secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and
refinement; the higher the state the more delicately adapted to
it the man.  In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a
ship lay in the harbour; one of those unquestionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of
the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable
irresponsibility of character.  This vessel had recently arrived
from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time would sail
for Bristol.  Hester Prynne--whose vocation, as a self-enlisted
Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain
and crew--could take upon herself to secure the passage of two
individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances
rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest,
the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to
depart.  It would probably be on the fourth day from the present.
"This is most fortunate!" he had then said to himself.  Now, why
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we
hesitate to reveal.  Nevertheless--to hold nothing back from the
reader--it was because, on the third day from the present, he
was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion
formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England
Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode
and time of terminating his professional career.  "At least, they
shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no
public duty unperformed or ill-performed!"  Sad, indeed, that an
introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's
should be so miserably deceived!  We have had, and may still
have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so
pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable,
of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the
real substance of his character.  No man, for any considerable
period, can wear one face to himself and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be
the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical
energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace.  The pathway
among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude
natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he
remembered it on his outward journey.  But he leaped across the
plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush,
climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable
activity that astonished him.  He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled
over the same ground, only two days before.  As he drew near the
town, he took an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves.  It seemed not
yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago,
since he had quitted them.  There, indeed, was each former trace
of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of
the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a
weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one.  Not
the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of
change.  The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he
met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the
little town.  They looked neither older nor younger now; the
beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe
of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on
whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the
minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their
mutability.  A similar impression struck him most remarkably as
he passed under the walls of his own church.  The edifice had so
very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr.
Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had
seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,
indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a
change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years.  The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation.  It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the forest.  He might
have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for
whom you take me!  I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn
into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook!  Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,
his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not
flung down there, like a cast-off garment!"  His friends, no
doubt, would still have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the
man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling.
In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the
impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister.  At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild,
wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing
out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.
For instance, he met one of his own deacons.  The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal
privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy
character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use
and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect,
which the minister's professional and private claims alike
demanded.  Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and
respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and
inferior order of endowment, towards a higher.  Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it
was only by the most careful self-control that the former could
refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose
into his mind, respecting the communion-supper.  He absolutely
trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag
itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own
consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it.  And,
even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid
laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon
would have been petrified by his minister's impiety.

Again, another incident of the same nature.  Hurrying along the
street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest
female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old
dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of
reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead
friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied
gravestones.  Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy
sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by
religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith
she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years.  And
since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's
chief earthly comfort--which, unless it had been likewise a
heavenly comfort, could have been none at all--was to meet her
pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed
with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth,
from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously
attentive ear.  But, on this occasion, up to the moment of
putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the
great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of
Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it
then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the
immortality of the human soul.  The instilment thereof into her
mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down
dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous
infusion.  What he really did whisper, the minister could never
afterwards recollect.  There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder
in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to
the good widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted
after a method of its own.  Assuredly, as the minister looked
back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy
that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so
wrinkled and ashy pale.

Again, a third instance.  After parting from the old church
member, he met the youngest sister of them all.  It was a maiden
newly-won--and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon,
on the Sabbath after his vigil--to barter the transitory
pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume
brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would
gild the utter gloom with final glory.  She was fair and pure as
a lily that had bloomed in Paradise.  The minister knew well that
he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her
heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity.
Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away
from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this
sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and
desperate man.  As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to
condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a
germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear
black fruit betimes.  Such was his sense of power over this
virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt
potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked
look, and develop all its opposite with but a word.  So--with a
mightier struggle than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva
cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of
recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness
as she might.  She ransacked her conscience--which was full of
harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work-bag--and
took herself to task, poor thing! for a thousand imaginary
faults, and went about her household duties with swollen eyelids
the next morning.


Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this
last temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more
ludicrous, and almost as horrible.  It was--we blush to tell
it--it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked
words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing
there, and had but just begun to talk.  Denying himself this
freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of
the ship's crew from the Spanish Main.  And here, since he had so
valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale
longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and
recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute
sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid,
satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths!  It was not so much a
better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still
more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him
safely through the latter crisis.

"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister
to himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his
hand against his forehead.

"Am I mad?  or am I given over utterly to the fiend?  Did I make
a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood?
And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the
performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination
can conceive?"

At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed
with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old
Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been
passing by.  She made a very grand appearance, having on a high
head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the
famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend,
had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been
hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder.  Whether the witch had
read the minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop,
looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and--though
little given to converse with clergymen--began a conversation.

"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,"
observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him.
"The next time I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I
shall be proud to bear you company.  Without taking overmuch upon
myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."

"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave
obeisance, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good
breeding made imperative--"I profess, on my conscience and
character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport
of your words!  I went not into the forest to seek a potentate,
neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a
view to gaining the favour of such personage.  My one sufficient
object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle
Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath
won from heathendom!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister.  "Well, well! we must needs talk thus
in the daytime!  You carry it off like an old hand!  But at
midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!"

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back
her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a
secret intimacy of connexion.

"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend
whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag
has chosen for her prince and master?"

The wretched minister!  He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with
deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin.  And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system.  It had
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones.  Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was
good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened
him.  And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a
real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.

He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the
burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his
study.  The minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world by any of those
strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been
continually impelled while passing through the streets.  He
entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books,
its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted
him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward.  Here he had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray;
here borne a hundred thousand agonies!  There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to
him, and God's voice through all.

There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an
unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where
his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days
before.  He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked
minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written
thus far into the Election Sermon!  But he seemed to stand apart,
and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious
curiosity.  That self was gone.  Another man had returned out of
the forest--a wiser one--with a knowledge of hidden mysteries
which the simplicity of the former never could have reached.  A
bitter kind of knowledge that!

While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door
of the study, and the minister said, "Come in!"--not wholly
devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit.  And so he
did!  It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered.  The minister
stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.

"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found
you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot?  But methinks, dear sir,
you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been
too sore for you.  Will not my aid be requisite to put you in
heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?"

"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  "My
journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free
air which I have breathed have done me good, after so long
confinement in my study.  I think to need no more of your drugs,
my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a
friendly hand."

All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister
with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his
patient.  But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was
almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or, at least, his
confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with
Hester Prynne.  The physician knew then that in the minister's
regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest
enemy.  So much being known, it would appear natural that a part
of it should be expressed.  It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what
security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may
approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it.  Thus
the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would
touch, in express words, upon the real position which they
sustained towards one another.  Yet did the physician, in his
dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.

"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill
tonight?  Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong
and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse.  The
people look for great things from you, apprehending that another
year may come about and find their pastor gone."

"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious
resignation.  "Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good
sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the
flitting seasons of another year!  But touching your medicine,
kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it not."

"I joy to hear it," answered the physician.  "It may be that my
remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due
effect.  Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's
gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"

"I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile.  "I thank you, and
can but requite your good deeds with my prayers."

"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave.  "Yea, they are the current
gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint mark on
them!"

Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and
requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with
ravenous appetite.  Then flinging the already written pages of
the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another,
which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and
emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered
that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn
music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he.
However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved
for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and
ecstasy.

Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he
careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the
curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the
study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled eyes.
There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a
vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!

XXI.  The New England Holiday


Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was
to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne
and little Pearl came into the market-place.  It was already
thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of
the town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were
many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as
belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded
the little metropolis of the colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven
years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth.
Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in
its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out
of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under
the moral aspect of its own illumination.  Her face, so long
familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which
they were accustomed to behold there.  It was like a mask; or,
rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had
departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now;
unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first
read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding
development in the countenance and mien.  Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the
multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph.  "Look your last on the scarlet letter
and its wearer!"--the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave,
as they fancied her, might say to them.  "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach!  A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to burn on her bosom!"  Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature,
should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.  Might there
not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless
draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all
her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured.  The wine
of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed
rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden
beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the
lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a
cordial of intensest potency.

Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety.  It would have been
impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed
its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at
once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to
contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a
peculiarity to Hester's simple robe.  The dress, so proper was it
to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development
and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be
separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower.  As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of
one idea with her nature.  On this eventful day, moreover, there
was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that
sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on
which it is displayed.  Children have always a sympathy in the
agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a
sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind,
in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem
on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of
her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement,
rather than walk by her mother's side.

She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and
sometimes piercing music.  When they reached the market-place,
she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and
bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the
broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than
the centre of a town's business.

"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she.  "Wherefore have all the
people left their work to-day?  Is it a play-day for the whole
world?  See, there is the blacksmith!  He has washed his sooty
face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he
would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him
how!  And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and
smiling at me.  Why does he do so, mother?"

"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.

"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that--the black,
grim, ugly-eyed old man!" said Pearl.  "He may nod at thee, if he
will; for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter.
But see, mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians
among them, and sailors!  What have they all come to do, here in
the market-place?"

"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester.  "For the
Governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers,
and all the great people and good people, with the music and the
soldiers marching before them."

"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl.  "And will he
hold out both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him
from the brook-side?"

"He will be there, child," answered her mother, "but he will not
greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him."

"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking
partly to herself.  "In the dark nighttime he calls us to him,
and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the
scaffold yonder!  And in the deep forest, where only the old
trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee,
sitting on a heap of moss!  And he kisses my forehead, too, so
that the little brook would hardly wash it off!  But, here, in
the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor
must we know him!  A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always
over his heart!"

"Be quiet, Pearl--thou understandest not these things," said her
mother.  "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and
see how cheery is everybody's face to-day.  The children have
come from their schools, and the grown people from their
workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy, for, to-day,
a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as has been
the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first
gathered--they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden
year were at length to pass over the poor old world!"

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people.  Into this festal season of
the year--as it already was, and continued to be during the
greater part of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever
mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity;
thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the
space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave
than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which
undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age.  The
persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to
an inheritance of Puritanic gloom.  They were native Englishmen,
whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great
mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and
joyous, as the world has ever witnessed.  Had they followed their
hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have
illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions.  Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to
combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it
were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of
state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on.  There was
some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of
celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony
commenced.  The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a
colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London--we will not say at a royal
coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show--might be traced in the
customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the
annual installation of magistrates.  The fathers and founders of
the commonwealth--the statesman, the priest, and the
soldier--seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and
majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked
upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence.  All came
forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus
impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government
so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes
of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same
piece and material with their religion.  Here, it is true, were
none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily
have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of
James--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his
harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to
his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no
Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a
hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the
very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.  All such professors
of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly
repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which give law its vitality.  Not the less,
however, the great, honest face of the people smiled--grimly,
perhaps, but widely too.  Nor were sports wanting, such as the
colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country
fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was
thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the
courage and manliness that were essential in them.  Wrestling
matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,
were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner,
there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted
most interest of all--on the platform of the pillory, already so
noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an
exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.  But, much to the
disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off
by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an
abuse of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people
being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the
offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day),
that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping,
with their descendants, even at so long an interval as
ourselves.  Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so
darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent
years have not sufficed to clear it up.  We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its
general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English
emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue.  A party
of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered
deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and
feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed
spear--stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain.  Nor, wild as
were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of
the scene.  This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main--who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day.
They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,
and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were
confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough
plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some
instances, a sword.  From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of
palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and
merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity.  They transgressed
without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were
binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's very
nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling;
and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae
from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping
crowd around them.  It remarkably characterised the incomplete
morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was
allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element.
The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate
in our own.  There could be little doubt, for instance, that this
very ship's crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the
nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have
perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.

But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind,
with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law.  The
buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling and become at
once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor, even
in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a
personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually
associate.  Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks,
starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not
unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly
seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion
when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the
physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.

The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far
as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude.  He
wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his
hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted
with a feather.  There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on
his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed
anxious rather to display than hide.  A landsman could hardly
have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them
both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question
before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or
imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks.  As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as
pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol
ship strolled idly through the market-place; until happening to
approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared
to recognise, and did not hesitate to address her.  As was
usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area--a
sort of magic circle--had formed itself about her, into which,
though the people were elbowing one another at a little
distance, none ventured or felt disposed to intrude.  It was a
forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter
enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and
partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures.  Now, if never before, it
answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to
speak together without risk of being overheard; and so changed
was Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the matron in
town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have held such
intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.

"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make
ready one more berth than you bargained for!  No fear of scurvy
or ship fever this voyage.  What with the ship's surgeon and this
other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by
token, as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I
traded for with a Spanish vessel."

"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she
permitted to appear.  "Have you another passenger?"

"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth he calls himself--is minded to try my
cabin-fare with you?  Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he
tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to the
gentleman you spoke of--he that is in peril from these sour old
Puritan rulers."

"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien
of calmness, though in the utmost consternation.  "They have long
dwelt together."

Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne.
But at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself,
standing in the remotest corner of the market-place and smiling
on her; a smile which--across the wide and bustling square, and
through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods,
and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.

XXII.  The Procession


Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and
consider what was practicable to be done in this new and
startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was
heard approaching along a contiguous street.  It denoted the
advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way
towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom
thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.

Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place.  First came the music.  It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and
played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object
for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to
the multitude--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to
the scene of life that passes before the eye.  Little Pearl at
first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and
seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long
heaves and swells of sound.  But she was brought back to her
former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and
bright armour of the military company, which followed after the
music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession.  This
body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence,
and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable
fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.  Its ranks were
filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse,
and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in
an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war.  The high estimation then placed upon the
military character might be seen in the lofty port of each
individual member of the company.  Some of them, indeed, by their
services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European
warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp
of soldiership.  The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished
steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a
brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to
equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's
eye.  Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty
that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not
absurd.  It was an age when what we call talent had far less
consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce
stability and dignity of character a great deal more.  The people
possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which,
in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection
and estimate of public men.  The change may be for good or ill,
and is partly, perhaps, for both.  In that old day the English
settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and all
degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence was strong in him--bestowed it on the
white hair and venerable brow of age--on long-tried
integrity--on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience--on
endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea
of permanence, and comes under the general definition of
respectability.  These primitive statesmen,
therefore--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished
by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect.  They
had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or
peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of
cliffs against a tempestuous tide.  The traits of character here
indicated were well represented in the square cast of
countenance and large physical development of the new colonial
magistrates.  So far as a demeanour of natural authority was
concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.

Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of
the anniversary was expected.  His was the profession at that era
in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in
political life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question
it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping
respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into
its service.  Even political power--as in the case of Increase
Mather--was within the grasp of a successful priest.

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never,
since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England
shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and
air with which he kept his pace in the procession.  There was no
feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent,
nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart.  Yet, if the
clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the
body.  It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelical
ministrations.  It might be the exhilaration of that potent
cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest
and long-continued thought.  Or perchance his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music that
swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music.  There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force.  But where was his
mind?  Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with
preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing,
heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the
spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along,
unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like
itself.  Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid,
possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they
throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many
more.

Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a
dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew
not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and
utterly beyond her reach.  One glance of recognition she had
imagined must needs pass between them.  She thought of the dim
forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish,
and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had
mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur
of the brook.  How deeply had they known each other then!  And was
this the man?  She hardly knew him now!  He, moving proudly past,
enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of
majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his
worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!  Her
spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion,
and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real
bond betwixt the clergyman and herself.  And thus much of woman
was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him--least
of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate
might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!--for being able so
completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world--while
she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found
him not.

Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or
herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen
around the minister.  While the procession passed, the child was
uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of
taking flight.  When the whole had gone by, she looked up into
Hester's face--

"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me
by the brook?"

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother.  "We
must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in
the forest."

"I could not be sure that it was he--so strange he looked,"
continued the child.  "Else I would have run to him, and bid him
kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among
the dark old trees.  What would the minister have said, mother?
Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on
me, and bid me begone?"

"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was
no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the
market-place?  Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not
speak to him!"

Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose
eccentricities--insanity, as we should term it--led her to do
what few of the townspeople would have ventured on--to begin a
conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public.  It
was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a
triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a
gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession.  As this
ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less
a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the
works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds.
Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne--kindly as so many now
felt towards the latter--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins
had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the
market-place in which the two women stood.

"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester.  "Yonder divine man!  That
saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must
needs say--he really looks!  Who, now, that saw him pass in the
procession, would think how little while it is since he went
forth out of his study--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in
his mouth, I warrant--to take an airing in the forest!  Aha! we
know what that means, Hester Prynne!  But truly, forsooth, I find
it hard to believe him the same man.  Many a church member saw I,
walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure
with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian
powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us!  That is but a
trifle, when a woman knows the world.  But this minister.  Couldst
thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that
encountered thee on the forest path?"

"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely
startled and awe-stricken by the confidence with which she
affirmed a personal connexion between so many persons (herself
among them) and the Evil One.  "It is not for me to talk lightly
of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale."

"Fie, woman--fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at
Hester.  "Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many
times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there?
Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore while
they danced be left in their hair!  I know thee, Hester, for I
behold the token.  We may all see it in the sunshine! and it
glows like a red flame in the dark.  Thou wearest it openly, so
there need be no question about that.  But this minister!  Let me
tell thee in thine ear!  When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters
so that the mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the
eyes of all the world!  What is that the minister seeks to hide,
with his hand always over his heart?  Ha, Hester Prynne?"

"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"

"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence.  "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or
another.  They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince
of Air!  Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to see thy
father?  Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her,
the weird old gentlewoman took her departure.

By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
were heard commencing his discourse.  An irresistible feeling
kept Hester near the spot.  As the sacred edifice was too much
thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position
close beside the scaffold of the pillory.  It was in sufficient
proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of
an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister's very
peculiar voice.

This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the
preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the
mere tone and cadence.  Like all other music, it breathed passion
and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to
the human heart, wherever educated.  Muffled as the sound was by
its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened
with such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the
sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its
indistinguishable words.  These, perhaps, if more distinctly
heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged
the spiritual sense.  Now she caught the low undertone, as of the
wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it
rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power,
until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe
and solemn grandeur.  And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes
became, there was for ever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness.  A loud or low expression of anguish--the whisper,
or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity,
that touched a sensibility in every bosom!  At times this deep
strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard
sighing amid a desolate silence.  But even when the minister's
voice grew high and commanding--when it gushed irrepressibly
upward--when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so
overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid
walls, and diffuse itself in the open air--still, if the auditor
listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same
cry of pain.  What was it?  The complaint of a human heart,
sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of
guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its
sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and
never in vain!  It was this profound and continual undertone that
gave the clergyman his most appropriate power.

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of
the scaffold.  If the minister's voice had not kept her there,
there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in
that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of
ignominy.  There was a sense within her--too ill-defined to be
made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind--that her whole
orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this
spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place.  She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as
a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky
foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves.  She had an undulating,
but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement.  It indicated the
restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude.  Whenever Pearl saw
anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in
requital.  The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none
the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from
the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone
through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity.  She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew
conscious of a nature wilder than his own.  Thence, with native
audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew
into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild
men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they
gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the
sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted
with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in
the night-time.

One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had
spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that
he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a
kiss.  Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a
humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain
that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child.  Pearl
immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy
skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it
was difficult to imagine her without it.

"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"

"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.

"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to
bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him.  So
let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee.  Wilt
thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"

"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!"
cried Pearl, with a naughty smile.  "If thou callest me that
ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship
with a tempest!"

Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child
returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had
said.  Hester's strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost
sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an
inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to
open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of
misery--showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the
midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected
to another trial.  There were many people present from the
country round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter,
and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or
exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own
bodily eyes.  These, after exhausting other modes of amusement,
now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish
intrusiveness.  Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not
bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards.  At that
distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired.  The
whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of
spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came
and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the
ring.  Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of
the white man's curiosity and, gliding through the crowd,
fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom,
conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly
embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity
among her people.  Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own
interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the
same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all
the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar
shame.  Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that
group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the
prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only
compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made.
At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the
burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more
remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more
painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.

While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the
cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for
ever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred
pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to
his control.  The sainted minister in the church!  The woman of
the scarlet letter in the marketplace!  What imagination would
have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching
stigma was on them both!

XXIII.   The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter



The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience
had been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at
length came to a pause.  There was a momentary silence, profound
as what should follow the utterance of oracles.  Then ensued a
murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if the auditors, released from
the high spell that had transported them into the region of
another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all their
awe and wonder still heavy on them.  In a moment more the crowd
began to gush forth from the doors of the church.  Now that there
was an end, they needed more breath, more fit to support the
gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that
atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame,
and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.

In the open air their rapture broke into speech.  The street and
the market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with
applauses of the minister.  His hearers could not rest until they
had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell
or hear.

According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so
wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;
nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more
evidently than it did through his.  Its influence could be seen,
as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and
continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay
before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as
marvellous to himself as to his audience.  His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the
communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New
England which they were here planting in the wilderness.  And, as
he drew towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon
him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old
prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin
on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and
glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord.  But,
throughout it all, and through the whole discourse, there had
been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be
interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away.  Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so
loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a
sigh--had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would
soon leave them in their tears.  This idea of his transitory stay
on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher
had produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies,
had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant--at
once a shadow and a splendour--and had shed down a shower of
golden truths upon them.

Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most
men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognised until
they see it far behind them--an epoch of life more brilliant and
full of triumph than any previous one, or than any which could
hereafter be.  He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest
eminence of superiority, to which the gifts or intellect, rich
lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest
sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England's earliest
days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty
pedestal.  Such was the position which the minister occupied, as
he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the
close of his Election Sermon.  Meanwhile Hester Prynne was
standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet
letter still burning on her breast!

Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured
tramp of the military escort issuing from the church door.  The
procession was to be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a
solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day.

Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic
fathers were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people,
who drew back reverently, on either side, as the Governor and
magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy ministers, and all
that were eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of them.
When they were fairly in the marketplace, their presence was
greeted by a shout.  This--though doubtless it might acquire
additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which
the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be an irrepressible
outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high
strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears.
Each felt the impulse in himself, and in the same breath, caught
it from his neighbour.  Within the church, it had hardly been
kept down; beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith.  There
were human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and
symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than
the organ tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the
sea; even that mighty swell of many voices, blended into one
great voice by the universal impulse which makes likewise one
vast heart out of the many.  Never, from the soil of New England
had gone up such a shout!  Never, on New England soil had stood
the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!

How fared it with him, then?  Were there not the brilliant
particles of a halo in the air about his head?  So etherealised
by spirit as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping
admirers, did his footsteps, in the procession, really tread
upon the dust of earth?

As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all
eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen
to approach among them.  The shout died into a murmur, as one
portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him.
How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph!  The
energy--or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up,
until he should have delivered the sacred message that had
brought its own strength along with it from heaven--was
withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its office.
The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly
among the late decaying embers.  It seemed hardly the face of a
man alive, with such a death-like hue: it was hardly a man with
life in him, that tottered on his path so nervously, yet
tottered, and did not fall!

One of his clerical brethren--it was the venerable John
Wilson--observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by
the retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward
hastily to offer his support.  The minister tremulously, but
decidedly, repelled the old man's arm.  He still walked onward,
if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled
the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother's arms in
view, outstretched to tempt him forward.  And now, almost
imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he had
come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between,
Hester Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare.
There stood Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand!  And there
was the scarlet letter on her breast!  The minister here made a
pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing
march to which the procession moved.  It summoned him
onward--inward to the festival!--but here he made a pause.

Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye
upon him.  He now left his own place in the procession, and
advanced to give assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's
aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall.  But there was
something in the latter's expression that warned back the
magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague
intimations that pass from one spirit to another.  The crowd,
meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder.  This earthly
faintness, was, in their view, only another phase of the
minister's celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a
miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended
before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at
last into the light of heaven!

He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.

"Hester," said he, "come hither!  Come, my little Pearl!"

It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it.  The
child, with the bird-like motion, which was one of her
characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms about his
knees.  Hester Prynne--slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate,
and against her strongest will--likewise drew near, but paused
before she reached him.  At this instant old Roger Chillingworth
thrust himself through the crowd--or, perhaps, so dark,
disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether
region--to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do!  Be
that as it might, the old man rushed forward, and caught the
minister by the arm.

"Madman, hold!  what is your purpose?" whispered he.  "Wave back
that woman!  Cast off this child!  All shall be well!  Do not
blacken your fame, and perish in dishonour!  I can yet save you!
Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?"

"Ha, tempter!  Methinks thou art too late!" answered the
minister, encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly.  "Thy
power is not what it was!  With God's help, I shall escape thee
now!"

He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.

"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the
name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at
this last moment, to do what--for my own heavy sin and miserable
agony--I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither
now, and twine thy strength about me!  Thy strength, Hester; but
let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me!  This
wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his
might!--with all his own might, and the fiend's!  Come,
Hester--come!  Support me up yonder scaffold."

The crowd was in a tumult.  The men of rank and dignity, who
stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by
surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they
saw--unable to receive the explanation which most readily
presented itself, or to imagine any other--that they remained
silent and inactive spectators of the judgement which Providence
seemed about to work.  They beheld the minister, leaning on
Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approach
the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little hand
of the sin-born child was clasped in his.  Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the
drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and
well entitled, therefore to be present at its closing scene.

"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he looking darkly
at the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret--no high
place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me--save
on this very scaffold!"

"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the
minister.

Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of
doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed,
that there was a feeble smile upon his lips.

"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in
the forest?"

"I know not!  I know not!" she hurriedly replied.  "Better?  Yea;
so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us!"

"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the
minister; "and God is merciful!  Let me now do the will which He
hath made plain before my sight.  For, Hester, I am a dying man.
So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!"

Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of
little Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the
dignified and venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were
his brethren; to the people, whose great heart was thoroughly
appalled yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that
some deep life-matter--which, if full of sin, was full of
anguish and repentance likewise--was now to be laid open to
them.  The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the
clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood
out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar
of Eternal Justice.

"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over
them, high, solemn, and majestic--yet had always a tremor
through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a
fathomless depth of remorse and woe--"ye, that have loved
me!--ye, that have deemed me holy!--behold me here, the one
sinner of the world!  At last--at last!--I stand upon the spot
where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this
woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have
crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from
grovelling down upon my face!  Lo, the scarlet letter which
Hester wears!  Ye have all shuddered at it!  Wherever her walk
hath been--wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped
to find repose--it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her.  But there stood one in the midst of
you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"

It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the
remainder of his secret undisclosed.  But he fought back the
bodily weakness--and, still more, the faintness of heart--that
was striving for the mastery with him.  He threw off all
assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the
woman and the children.

"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so
determined was he to speak out the whole.  "God's eye beheld it!
The angels were for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew it
well, and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning
finger!) But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you
with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful
world!--and sad, because he missed his heavenly kindred!  Now, at
the death-hour, he stands up before you!  He bids you look again
at Hester's scarlet letter!  He tells you, that, with all its
mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his
own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more
than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!  Stand any
here that question God's judgment on a sinner!  Behold!  Behold,
a dreadful witness of it!"

With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast.  It was revealed!  But it were irreverent to
describe that revelation.  For an instant, the gaze of the
horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly
miracle; while the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in
his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a
victory.  Then, down he sank upon the scaffold!  Hester partly
raised him, and supported his head against her bosom.  Old Roger
Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull
countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.

"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once.  "Thou hast
escaped me!"

"May God forgive thee!" said the minister.  "Thou, too, hast
deeply sinned!"

He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on
the woman and the child.

"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there was a sweet and
gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep
repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost
as if he would be sportive with the child--"dear little Pearl,
wilt thou kiss me now?  Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest!
But now thou wilt?"

Pearl kissed his lips.  A spell was broken.  The great scene of
grief, in which the wild infant bore a part had developed all
her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek,
they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and
sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in
it.  Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of
anguish was fulfilled.

"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"

"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down
close to his.  "Shall we not spend our immortal life together?
Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!
Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes!
Then tell me what thou seest!"

"Hush, Hester--hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity.  "The
law we broke!--the sin here awfully revealed!--let these alone
be in thy thoughts!  I fear!  I fear!  It may be, that, when we
forgot our God--when we violated our reverence each for the
other's soul--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet
hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.  God knows; and He
is merciful!  He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my
afflictions.  By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my
breast!  By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the
torture always at red-heat!  By bringing me hither, to die this
death of triumphant ignominy before the people!  Had either of
these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever!  Praised be
His name!  His will be done!  Farewell!"

That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath.
The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep
voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance,
save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed
spirit.

XXIV.  Conclusion


After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange
their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was
more than one account of what had been witnessed on the
scaffold.


Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast
of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of
that worn by Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh.  As regarded
its origin there were various explanations, all of which must
necessarily have been conjectural.  Some affirmed that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne
first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance--which he afterwards, in so many futile methods,
followed out--by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.  Others
contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long
time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of
magic and poisonous drugs.  Others, again and those best able to
appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body--whispered their
belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active
tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and
at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible
presence of the letter.  The reader may choose among these
theories.  We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,
erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation
has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were
spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have
removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that
there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a
new-born infant's.  Neither, by their report, had his dying words
acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any--the
slightest--connexion on his part, with the guilt for which
Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter.  According to
these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that
he was dying--conscious, also, that the reverence of the
multitude placed him already among saints and angels--had
desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen
woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the
choicest of man's own righteousness.  After exhausting life in
his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner
of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the
mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite
Purity, we are sinners all alike.  It was to teach them, that the
holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as
to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and
repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would
look aspiringly upward.  Without disputing a truth so momentous,
we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's
story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a
man's friends--and especially a clergyman's--will sometimes
uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine
on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained
creature of the dust.

The authority which we have chiefly followed--a manuscript of
old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals,
some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the
tale from contemporary witnesses fully confirms the view taken
in the foregoing pages.  Among many morals which press upon us
from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this
into a sentence:--"Be true!  Be true!  Be true!  Show freely to the
world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may
be inferred!"

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place,
almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the
appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger
Chillingworth.  All his strength and energy--all his vital and
intellectual force--seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that
he positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished
from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in
the sun.  This unhappy man had made the very principle of his
life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of
revenge; and when, by its completest triumph consummation that
evil principle was left with no further material to support
it--when, in short, there was no more Devil's work on earth for
him to do, it only remained for the unhumanised mortal to betake
himself whither his master would find him tasks enough, and pay
him his wages duly.  But, to all these shadowy beings, so long
our near acquaintances--as well Roger Chillingworth as his
companions we would fain be merciful.  It is a curious subject of
observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same
thing at bottom.  Each, in its utmost development, supposes a
high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one
individual dependent for the food of his affections and
spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate lover,
or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the
withdrawal of his subject.  Philosophically considered,
therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except
that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the
other in a dusky and lurid glow.  In the spiritual world, the old
physician and the minister--mutual victims as they have
been--may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred
and antipathy transmuted into golden love.

Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to
communicate to the reader.  At old Roger Chillingworth's decease,
(which took place within the year), and by his last will and
testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr.
Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount
of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the
daughter of Hester Prynne.

So Pearl--the elf child--the demon offspring, as some people up
to that epoch persisted in considering her--became the richest
heiress of her day in the New World.  Not improbably this
circumstance wrought a very material change in the public
estimation; and had the mother and child remained here, little
Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have mingled her
wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them
all.  But, in no long time after the physician's death, the
wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with
her.  For many years, though a vague report would now and then
find its way across the sea--like a shapeless piece of driftwood
tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it--yet no
tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received.  The
story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend.  Its spell,
however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the
poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the
sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt.  Near this latter spot,
one afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a
tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door.  In all
those years it had never once been opened; but either she
unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand,
or she glided shadow-like through these impediments--and, at all
events, went in.

On the threshold she paused--turned partly round--for perchance
the idea of entering alone and all so changed, the home of so
intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even
she could bear.  But her hesitation was only for an instant,
though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast.

And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken
shame!  But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now
have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood.  None
knew--nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect
certainty--whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a
maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened
and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness.  But
through the remainder of Hester's life there were indications
that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love
and interest with some inhabitant of another land.  Letters came,
with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to
English heraldry.  In the cottage there were articles of comfort
and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only
wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her.
There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a
continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate
fingers at the impulse of a fond heart.  And once Hester was seen
embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of
golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant
thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued community.

In fine, the gossips of that day believed--and Mr. Surveyor Pue,
who made investigations a century later, believed--and one of
his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully
believes--that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy,
and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have
entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New
England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a
home.  Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet
to be her penitence.  She had returned, therefore, and resumed--of
her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron
period would have imposed it--resumed the symbol of which we
have related so dark a tale.  Never afterwards did it quit her
bosom.  But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and
self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet
letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn
and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed
over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.  And, as
Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for
her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows
and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had
herself gone through a mighty trouble.  Women, more
especially--in the continually recurring trials of wounded,
wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion--or
with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued
and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were
so wretched, and what the remedy!  Hester comforted and
counselled them, as best she might.  She assured them, too, of
her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world
should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth
would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation
between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.
Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself
might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognised
the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious
truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down
with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.  The angel
and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed,
but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through
dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how
sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life
successful to such an end.

So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter.  And, after many, many years, a new grave was
delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside
which King's Chapel has since been built.  It was near that old
and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of
the two sleepers had no right to mingle.  Yet one tomb-stone
served for both.  All around, there were monuments carved with
armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate--as the
curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with
the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon.  It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may
serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded
legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing
point of light gloomier than the shadow:--

"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"