Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864
Language: English
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THE SCARLET LETTER

by Nathaniel Hawthorne



EDITOR'S NOTE

Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale
writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet
Letter" appeared.  He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804,
son of a sea-captain.  He led there a shy and rather sombre life;
of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his
moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered.  Its
colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told
Tales" and other short stories, the product of his first literary
period.  Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break
through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all,
his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost
uncanny prescience and subtlety.  "The Scarlet Letter," which
explains as much of this unique imaginative art, as is to be
gathered from reading his highest single achievement, yet needs
to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its
last effect.  In the year that saw it published, he began "The
House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of
the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it--
defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as
Emerson has it.  Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New
Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.

The following is the table of his romances,
stories, and other works:

Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st
Series, 1837; 2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history
for youth, 1845: Famous Old People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841
Liberty Tree: with the last words of Grandfather's Chair, 1842;
Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses from an Old
Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven
Gables, 1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the whole
History of Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and
Boys, 1851; The Snow Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale
Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales
(2nd Series of the Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill from the Town-Pump,
with remarks, by Telba, 1857; The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of
Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE) (published in England under the
title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old Home, 1863; Dolliver
Romance (1st Part in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3 Parts, 1876;
Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last literary effort, 1864;
American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by Sophia
Hawthorne, 1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius
Felton; or, the Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"),
1872; Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, with Preface and Notes by
Julian Hawthorne, 1882.

Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the
Province House, 1877, contain tales which had already been
printed in book form in "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses"
"Sketched and Studies," 1883.

Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of
his tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token,"
1831-1838, "New England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker,"
1837-1839; "Democratic Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly,"
1860-1872 (scenes from the Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton,
and passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books).

Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory
notes by Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.

Biography, etc.; A. H. Japp (pseud.  H. A. Page), Memoir of N.
Hawthorne, 1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G.
P. Lathrop, "A Study of Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men
of Letters, 1879; Julian Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his
wife," 1885; Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
1891; Analytical Index of Hawthorne's Works, by E. M. O'Connor
1882.


CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTORY.     THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

    CHAPTER I.        THE PRISON-DOOR

    CHAPTER II.       THE MARKET-PLACE

    CHAPTER III.      THE RECOGNITION

    CHAPTER IV.       THE INTERVIEW

    CHAPTER V.        HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

    CHAPTER VI.       PEARL

    CHAPTER VII.      THE GOVERNOR'S HALL

    CHAPTER VIII.     THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

    CHAPTER IX.       THE LEECH

    CHAPTER X.        THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

    CHAPTER XI.       THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

    CHAPTER XII.      THE MINISTER'S VIGIL

    CHAPTER XIII.     ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

    CHAPTER XIV.      HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

    CHAPTER XV.       HESTER AND PEARL

    CHAPTER XVI.      A FOREST WALK

    CHAPTER XVII.     THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

    CHAPTER XVIII.    A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

    CHAPTER XIX.      THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE

    CHAPTER XX.       THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

    CHAPTER XXI.      THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

    CHAPTER XXII.     THE PROCESSION

    CHAPTER XXIII.    THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

    CHAPTER XXIV.     CONCLUSION



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER"


It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk
overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my
personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my
life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.  The
first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the
reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the
indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a
description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old
Manse.  And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough
to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize
the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience
in a Custom-House.  The example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of
this Parish," was never more faithfully followed.  The truth
seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon
the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling
aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will
understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.
Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge
themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at
large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided
segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of
existence by bringing him into communion with it.  It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak
impersonally.  But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance
benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with
his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a
kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is
listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed
by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances
that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the
inmost Me behind its veil.  To this extent, and within these
limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without
violating either the reader's rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as
explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into
my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a
narrative therein contained.  This, in fact--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of
the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume--this,
and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation
with the public.  In accomplishing the main purpose, it has
appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described,
together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom
the author happened to make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century
ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but
which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and
exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps,
a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging
hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out
her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated
wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many
languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with
a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick.  From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or
droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of
Uncle Sam's government is here established.  Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street.  Over the entrance hovers an
enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw.  With
the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye,
and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief
to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all
citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings.  Nevertheless,
vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very
moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal
eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness
and snugness of an eiderdown pillow.  But she has no great
tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or
later--oftener soon than late--is apt to fling off her nestlings
with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we
may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of
late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business.  In
some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon
when affairs move onward with a livelier tread.  Such occasions
might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last
war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned,
as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at
New York or Boston.  On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America--or to be on the verge of their departure
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly
up and down the granite steps.  Here, before his own wife has
greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in
port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin
box.  Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious or
in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished
voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities
such as nobody will care to rid him of.  Here, likewise--the germ
of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant--we
have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a
wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond.  Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound
sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one,
pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital.  Nor must we
forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring
firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but
contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying
trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were,
with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for
the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene.  More
frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern--
in the entry if it were summer time, or in their appropriate
rooms if wintry or inclement weathers--a row of venerable
figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on
their hind legs back against the wall.  Oftentimes they were
asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of
energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all
other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on
monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent
exertions.  These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew at the
receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a
lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view
of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across
a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street.  All three
give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers,
slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are
generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old
salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a
seaport.  The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint;
its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has
elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude,
from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a
sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the
broom and mop, has very infrequent access.  In the way of
furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old
pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three
wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and--not
to forget the library--on some shelves, a score or two of
volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the
Revenue laws.  A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms
a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice.
And here, some six months ago--pacing from corner to corner, or
lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk,
and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning
newspaper--you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same
individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where
the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse.  But now, should you go
thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco
Surveyor.  The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and
a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his
emoluments.

This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt
much away from it both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses,
or did possess, a hold on my affection, the force of which I
have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.
Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few
or none of which pretend to architectural beauty--its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only
tame--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea
at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other--such
being the features of my native town, it would be quite as
reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board.  And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which, in lack of a
better phrase, I must be content to call affection.  The
sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots
which my family has stuck into the soil.  It is now nearly two
centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest
emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city.  And
here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled
their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of
it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets.  In part, therefore, the
attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of
dust for dust.  Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as
frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need
they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality.  The figure of
that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back
as I can remember.  It still haunts me, and induces a sort of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference
to the present phase of the town.  I seem to have a stronger
claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so
early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street
with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man
of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name
is seldom heard and my face hardly known.  He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil.  He was likewise a bitter
persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in
their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to
be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these
were many.  His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches,
that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon
him.  So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the
Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have
not crumbled utterly to dust!  I know not whether these ancestors
of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven
for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the
heavy consequences of them in another state of being.  At all
events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby
take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse
incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and
unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back,
would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution
for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk
of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should
have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself.  No aim
that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no
success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever
been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than
worthless, if not positively disgraceful.  "What is he?" murmurs
one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other.  "A writer of
story books!  What kind of business in life--what mode of
glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and
generation--may that be?  Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler!"  Such are the compliments bandied
between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time!
And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by
these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since
subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as
I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom
or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a
claim to public notice.  Gradually, they have sunk almost out of
sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get
covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil.
From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from
the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took
the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray
and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.
The boy, also in due time, passed from the forecastle to the
cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with
the natal earth.  This long connexion of a family with one spot,
as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the
human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in
the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him.  It is not
love but instinct.  The new inhabitant--who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little
claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the
oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his
third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded.  It is no matter that
the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,
the chill east wind, and the chillest of social
atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see
or imagine, are nothing to the purpose.  The spell survives, and
just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly
paradise.  So has it been in my case.  I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and
cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever,
as one representative of the race lay down in the grave, another
assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in
the old town.  Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence
that the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at
last be severed.  Human nature will not flourish, any more than
a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series
of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had
other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within
my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me
to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as
well, or better, have gone somewhere else.  My doom was on me.  It
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away--as
it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad
halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of
the universe.  So, one fine morning I ascended the flight of
granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and
was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in
my weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the
Custom-House.

I doubt greatly--or, rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or
military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans
under his orders as myself.  The whereabouts of the Oldest
Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them.  For
upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent
position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of
the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure
of office generally so fragile.  A soldier--New England's most
distinguished soldier--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his
gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of
the successive administrations through which he had held office,
he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of
danger and heart-quake.  General Miller was radically
conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight
influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and
with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have
brought unquestionable improvement.  Thus, on taking charge of my
department, I found few but aged men.  They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on
every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous
blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook, where, with
little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a
Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of
existence.  Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men
to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other
that kept death at bay.  Two or three of their number, as I was
assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never
dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a
large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep
out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what
they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience,
betake themselves to bed again.  I must plead guilty to the
charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of
these venerable servants of the republic.  They were allowed, on
my representation, to rest from their arduous labours, and soon
afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for
their country's service--as I verily believe it was--withdrew to
a better world.  It is a pious consolation to me that, through my
interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance
of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall.
Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House
opens on the road to Paradise.

The greater part of my officers were Whigs.  It was well for
their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a
politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither
received nor held his office with any reference to political
services.  Had it been otherwise--had an active politician been
put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of
making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld
him from the personal administration of his office--hardly a man
of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life
within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the
Custom-House steps.  According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a
politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the
axe of the guillotine.  It was plain enough to discern that the
old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands.  It
pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors
that attended my advent, to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten
by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so
harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days,
had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely
enough to frighten Boreas himself to silence.  They knew, these
excellent old persons, that, by all established rule--and, as
regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency
for business--they ought to have given place to younger men,
more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves
to serve our common Uncle.  I knew it, too, but could never quite
find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.  Much and deservedly
to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down
the Custom-House steps.  They spent a good deal of time, also,
asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted
back against the walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth
repetition of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown
to be passwords and countersigns among them.

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor
had no great harm in him.  So, with lightsome hearts and the
happy consciousness of being usefully employed--in their own
behalf at least, if not for our beloved country--these good old
gentlemen went through the various formalities of office.
Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds
of vessels.  Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and
marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones
to slip between their fingers Whenever such a mischance
occurred--when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been
smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses--nothing could exceed the vigilance and
alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and
secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the
delinquent vessel.  Instead of a reprimand for their previous
negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on
their praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a
grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal the moment
that there was no longer any remedy.

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my
foolish habit to contract a kindness for them.  The better part
of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that
which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type
whereby I recognise the man.  As most of these old Custom-House
officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to
them, being paternal and protective, was favourable to the
growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all.  It
was pleasant in the summer forenoons--when the fervent heat,
that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems--it
was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of
them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen
witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came
bubbling with laughter from their lips.  Externally, the jollity
of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the
intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to
do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon
the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk.  In one case, however,
it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the
phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to
represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage.  In
the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there
were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked
ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and
dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.
Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to
be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.  But,
as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be
no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation
from their varied experience of life.  They seemed to have flung
away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had
enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully
to have stored their memory with the husks.  They spoke with far
more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or
yesterday's, to-day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the
shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's
wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the
respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was
a certain permanent Inspector.  He might truly be termed a
legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or
rather born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary
colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an
office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the
early ages which few living men can now remember.  This
Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years,
or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful
specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover
in a lifetime's search.  With his florid cheek, his compact
figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk
and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he
seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch.  His voice and laugh, which perpetually
re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous
quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting
out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a
clarion.  Looking at him merely as an animal--and there was very
little else to look at--he was a most satisfactory object, from
the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and
his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all,
the delights which he had ever aimed at or conceived of.  The
careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular
income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of
removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over
him.  The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the
rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of
intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and
spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in
barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on
all-fours.  He possessed no power of thought, no depth of
feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in short, but a
few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper
which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty
very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart.
He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the
father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of
childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust.  Here, one
would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the
sunniest disposition through and through with a sable tinge.  Not
so with our old Inspector.  One brief sigh sufficed to carry off
the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.  The next moment
he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier
than the Collector's junior clerk, who at nineteen years was
much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I
think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there
presented to my notice.  He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so
perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so
impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other.  My
conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing,
as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so
cunningly had the few materials of his character been put
together that there was no painful perception of deficiency,
but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him.
It might be difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should
exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely
his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his
last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral
responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger
scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed
immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.

One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his
four-footed brethren was his ability to recollect the good
dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of
his life to eat.  His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait;
and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle
or an oyster.  As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither
sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all
his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit
of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him
expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table.  His
reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the
actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey
under one's very nostrils.  There were flavours on his palate
that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years,
and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton chop
which he had just devoured for his breakfast.  I have heard him
smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except
himself, had long been food for worms.  It was marvellous to
observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually rising
up before him--not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful
for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an
endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual: a
tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of
pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder
Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience
of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his
individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent
effect as the passing breeze.  The chief tragic event of the old
man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a
certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years
ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table,
proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would make
no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with
an axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should
be glad to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men
whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a
Custom-House officer.  Most persons, owing to causes which I may
not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life.  The old Inspector was incapable of it;
and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, would be
just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as
good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my
comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to
sketch only in the merest outline.  It is that of the Collector,
our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military
service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western
territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honourable life.

The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his
earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial
music of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little
towards lightening.  The step was palsied now, that had been
foremost in the charge.  It was only with the assistance of a
servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade,
that he could slowly and painfully ascend the Custom-House
steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor, attain
his customary chair beside the fireplace.  There he used to sit,
gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures
that came and went, amid the rustle of papers, the administering
of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the
office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way
into his inner sphere of contemplation.  His countenance, in this
repose, was mild and kindly.  If his notice was sought, an
expression of courtesy and interest gleamed out upon his
features, proving that there was light within him, and that it
was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that
obstructed the rays in their passage.  The closer you penetrated
to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.  When no
longer called upon to speak or listen--either of which
operations cost him an evident effort--his face would briefly
subside into its former not uncheerful quietude.  It was not
painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the
imbecility of decaying age.  The framework of his nature,
originally strong and massive, was not yet crumpled into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such
disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build
up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from
a view of its grey and broken ruins.  Here and there, perchance,
the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be only
a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and
overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass
and alien weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection--for,
slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards
him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might
not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of
his portrait.  It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right,
that he had won a distinguished name.  His spirit could never, I
conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it
must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set
him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome,
and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to
give out or fail.  The heat that had formerly pervaded his
nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind
that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but rather a deep red
glow, as of iron in a furnace.  Weight, solidity, firmness--this
was the expression of his repose, even in such decay as had
crept untimely over him at the period of which I speak.  But I
could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness--roused by a trumpet's
peal, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not
dead, but only slumbering--he was yet capable of flinging off
his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of
age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a
warrior.  And, in so intense a moment his demeanour would have
still been calm.  Such an exhibition, however, was but to be
pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired.  What I
saw in him--as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile--was
the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might
well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of
integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a
somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or unmanageable
as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence which, fiercely as he
led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of
quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the
polemical philanthropists of the age.  He had slain men with his
own hand, for aught I know--certainly, they had fallen like
blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to
which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy--but, be that as
it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would
have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing.  I have not known
the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make
an appeal.

Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the
least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch--must have
vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General.  All merely
graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does
nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that
have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and
crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined
fortress of Ticonderoga.  Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting.  A ray of humour,
now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim
obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces.  A trait of
native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after
childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness
for the sight and fragrance of flowers.  An old soldier might be
supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here
was one who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the
floral tribe.

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit;
while the Surveyor--though seldom, when it could be avoided,
taking upon himself the difficult task of engaging him in
conversation--was fond of standing at a distance, and watching
his quiet and almost slumberous countenance.  He seemed away from
us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we
passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might
have stretched forth our hands and touched his own.  It might be
that he lived a more real life within his thoughts than amid the
unappropriate environment of the Collector's office.  The
evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish
of old heroic music, heard thirty years before--such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his
commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round
about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the
General appear to sustain the most distant relation.  He was as
much out of place as an old sword--now rusty, but which had
flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright
gleam along its blade--would have been among the inkstands,
paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's
desk.

There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and
re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier--the
man of true and simple energy.  It was the recollection of those
memorable words of his--"I'll try, Sir"--spoken on the very
verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all
perils, and encountering all.  If, in our country, valour were
rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase--which it seems so easy
to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and
glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest
of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual
health to be brought into habits of companionship with
individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits,
and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to
appreciate.  The accidents of my life have often afforded me this
advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during
my continuance in office.  There was one man, especially, the
observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent.  His
gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all
perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish
as by the waving of an enchanter's wand.  Bred up from boyhood in
the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the
many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper,
presented themselves before him with the regularity of a
perfectly comprehended system.  In my contemplation, he stood as
the ideal of his class.  He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its
variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution
like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their
own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference
to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them.
Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with.  With an easy
condescension, and kind forbearance towards our
stupidity--which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little
short of crime--would he forth-with, by the merest touch of his
finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight.  The
merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends.  His
integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather
than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate
as his to be honest and regular in the administration of
affairs.  A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very
much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, than an
error in the balance of an account, or an ink-blot on the fair
page of a book of record.  Here, in a word--and it is a rare
instance in my life--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted
to the situation which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself
connected.  I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence,
that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past
habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever
profit was to be had.  After my fellowship of toil and
impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm;
after living for three years within the subtle influence of an
intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau
about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden;
after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement
of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic
sentiment at Longfellow's hearthstone--it was time, at length,
that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish
myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a
man who had known Alcott.  I looked upon it as an evidence, in
some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking
no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of
altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment
in my regard.  I cared not at this period for books; they were
apart from me.  Nature--except it were human nature--the nature
that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden
from me; and all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been
spiritualized passed away out of my mind.  A gift, a faculty, if
it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.
There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all
this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to
recall whatever was valuable in the past.  It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be
lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I
had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would
be worth my while to take.  But I never considered it as other
than a transitory life.  There was always a prophetic instinct, a
low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever
a new change of custom should be essential to my good, change
would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as
I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be.  A
man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the
Surveyor's proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be
a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the
trouble.  My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains
with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of
connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in
no other character.  None of them, I presume, had ever read a
page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me
if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter,
in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written
with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a
Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good
lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has
dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among
the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the
narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how
utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that
he achieves, and all he aims at.  I know not that I especially
needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but
at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure
to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception,
ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh.  In
the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer--an
excellent fellow, who came into the office with me, and went out
only a little later--would often engage me in a discussion about
one or the other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or
Shakespeare.  The Collector's junior clerk, too a young gentleman
who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam's letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards)
looked very much like poetry--used now and then to speak to me
of books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant.
This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite
sufficient for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned
abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another
kind of vogue.  The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a
stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto,
and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,
in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and
gone regularly through the office.  Borne on such queer vehicle
of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys
it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope,
will never go again.

But the past was not dead.  Once in a great while, the thoughts
that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest
so quietly, revived again.  One of the most remarkable occasions,
when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings
it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the
sketch which I am now writing.

In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room,
in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been
covered with panelling and plaster.  The edifice--originally
projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of
the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined
never to be realized--contains far more space than its occupants
know what to do with.  This airy hall, therefore, over the
Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in
spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears
still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason.  At one end
of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one
upon another, containing bundles of official documents.  Large
quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor.  It was
sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and
years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were
now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes.  But
then, what reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the
dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a
purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had,
and--saddest of all--without purchasing for their writers the
comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had
gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen.  Yet not
altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history.
Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might
be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants--old King
Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--and many another
magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely
in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.
The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the
petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods
generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their
children look upon as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the
earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having,
probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the king's
officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston.  It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going
back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers
must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered
men, and to antique customs, which would have affected me with
the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads
in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a
discovery of some little interest.  Poking and burrowing into the
heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and another
document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago
foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of
merchants never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily
decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters
with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an
image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new
region, and only Salem knew the way thither--I chanced to lay my
hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient
yellow parchment.  This envelope had the air of an official
record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their
stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than
at present.  There was something about it that quickened an
instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that
tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here
be brought to light.  Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment
cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of
Governor Shirley, in favour of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of
His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay.  I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's
"Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about
fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent
times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice.  Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some
fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which,
unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation.  But, on examining the papers which the parchment
commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's
mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private
nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and
apparently with his own hand.  I could account for their being
included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by the fact
that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly, and that these
papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never
come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate
to the business of the revenue.  On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern,
was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, I suppose, at that
early day with business pertaining to his office--seems to have
devoted some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local
antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a similar nature.  These
supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust.

A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in
the present volume.  The remainder may perhaps be applied to
purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be
worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so
pious a task.  Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any
gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable
labour off my hands.  As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.  But the
object that most drew my attention to the mysterious package was
a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There
were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was
greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or very little, of the
glitter was left.  It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive,
with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am
assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence
of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered even by the process
of picking out the threads.  This rag of scarlet cloth--for time,
and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other
than a rag--on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter.

It was the capital letter A.  By an accurate measurement, each
limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in
length.  It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an
ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what
rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by
it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the
world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving.  And
yet it strangely interested me.  My eyes fastened themselves upon
the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.  Certainly
there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation,
and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol,
subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the
analysis of my mind.

When thus perplexed--and cogitating, among other hypotheses,
whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations
which the white men used to contrive in order to take the eyes
of Indians--I happened to place it on my breast.  It seemed to
me--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word--it seemed
to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether
physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the
letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.  I shuddered,
and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had
hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper,
around which it had been twisted.  This I now opened, and had the
satisfaction to find recorded by the old Surveyor's pen, a
reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair.  There were
several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting
the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to
have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our
ancestors.  She had flourished during the period between the
early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century.  Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative,
remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit
woman, of a stately and solemn aspect.  It had been her habit,
from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a
kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good
she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all
matters, especially those of the heart, by which means--as a
person of such propensities inevitably must--she gained from
many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should
imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a
nuisance.  Prying further into the manuscript, I found the record
of other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for most
of which the reader is referred to the story entitled "THE
SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully in mind that
the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue.  The original papers, together
with the scarlet letter itself--a most curious relic--are still
in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a
sight of them.  I must not be understood affirming that, in the
dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of
passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have
invariably confined myself within the limits of the old
Surveyor's half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap.  On the contrary, I
have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether,
as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own
invention.  What I contend for is the authenticity of the
outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old
track.  There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale.  It
impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a
hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig--which was
buried with him, but did not perish in the grave--had met me in
the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.  In his port was the
dignity of one who had borne His Majesty's commission, and who
was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone
so dazzlingly about the throne.  How unlike alas the hangdog look
of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people,
feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his
masters.  With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but
majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol and the
little roll of explanatory manuscript.  With his own ghostly
voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my
filial duty and reverence towards him--who might reasonably
regard himself as my official ancestor--to bring his mouldy and
moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.  "Do this," said the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that
looked so imposing within its memorable wig; "do this, and the
profit shall be all your own.  You will shortly need it; for it
is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a
life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom.  But I charge you, in
this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's
memory the credit which will be rightfully due" And I said to
the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue--"I will".

On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought.
It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while
pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a
hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the front door of
the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again.  Great
were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the
Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the
unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps.  Remembering their own former habits, they used to say
that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck.  They probably
fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for
which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary
motion--was to get an appetite for dinner.  And, to say the
truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much
indefatigable exercise.  So little adapted is the atmosphere of a
Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility,
that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come,
I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have
been brought before the public eye.  My imagination was a
tarnished mirror.  It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it.  The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered
malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge.  They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin
of contemptuous defiance.  "What have you to do with us?" that
expression seemed to say.  "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone!  You have
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold.  Go then, and earn
your wages!"  In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own
fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle
Sam claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched
numbness held possession of me.  It went with me on my sea-shore
walks and rambles into the country, whenever--which was seldom
and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and
activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the
threshold of the Old Manse.  The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and
weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study.  Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the
deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and
the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it
might well be deemed a hopeless case.  Moonlight, in a familiar
room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely visible,
yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the
most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his
illusive guests.  There is the little domestic scenery of the
well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall--all these details, so
completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that
they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of
intellect.  Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this
change, and acquire dignity thereby.  A child's shoe; the doll,
seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--whatever,
in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though
still almost as vividly present as by daylight.  Thus, therefore,
the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,
somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with
the nature of the other.  Ghosts might enter here without
affrighting us.  It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a
form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak
of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt
whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred
from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in
producing the effect which I would describe.  It throws its
unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness
upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon the
polish of the furniture.  This warmer light mingles itself with
the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it
were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms
which fancy summons up.  It converts them from snow-images into
men and women.  Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep
within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor,
and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture,
with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the
imaginative.  Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before
him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write
romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just
alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more
avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle.  An entire class of
susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great
richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order
of composition, my faculties would not have been found so
pointless and inefficacious.  I might, for instance, have
contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran
shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he
did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous
gifts as a story-teller.  Could I have preserved the picturesque
force of his style, and the humourous colouring which nature
taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I
honestly believe, would have been something new in literature.
Or I might readily have found a more serious task.  It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into
another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world
out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty
of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual
circumstance.  The wiser effort would have been to diffuse
thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day,
and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the
true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and
wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was
now conversant.  The fault was mine.  The page of life that was
spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I
had not fathomed its deeper import.  A better book than I shall
ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me,
just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour,
and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted
the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it.  At some
future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered
fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find
the letters turn to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late.  At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a
hopeless toil.  There was no occasion to make much moan about
this state of affairs.  I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably
poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs.  That was all.  But, nevertheless, it is anything
but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect
is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a
smaller and less volatile residuum.  Of the fact there could be
no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to
conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question.
In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these
effects.  Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of
long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or
respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure
by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of
his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such
a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in
every individual who has occupied the position--is, that while
he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper
strength departs from him.  He loses, in an extent proportioned
to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability
of self-support.  If he possesses an unusual share of native
energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long
upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.  The ejected
officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been.  But this seldom
happens.  He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his
own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to
totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may.
Conscious of his own infirmity--that his tempered steel and
elasticity are lost--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully
about him in quest of support external to himself.  His pervading
and continual hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all
discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him
while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the
cholera, torments him for a brief space after death--is, that
finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of
circumstances, he shall be restored to office.  This faith, more
than anything else, steals the pith and availability out of
whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking.  Why should he
toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out
of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his
Uncle will raise and support him?  Why should he work for his
living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon
to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket?  It is sadly curious
to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a
poor fellow with this singular disease.  Uncle Sam's
gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in
this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the devil's
wages.  Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may
find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its
courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all
that gives the emphasis to manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance.  Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be
so utterly undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment.
Yet my reflections were not the most comfortable.  I began to
grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind,
to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what
degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder.  I
endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the
Custom-House, and yet go forth a man.  To confess the truth, it
was my greatest apprehension--as it would never be a measure of
policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it
being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign--it was
my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and
decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another
animal as the old Inspector.  Might it not, in the tedious lapse
of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it
was with this venerable friend--to make the dinner-hour the
nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog
spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade?  A dreary
look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best
definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of
his faculties and sensibilities.  But, all this while, I was
giving myself very unnecessary alarm.  Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to
adopt the tone of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor
to the Presidency.  It is essential, in order to form a complete
estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the
incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration.  His
position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in
every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can
possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on either
hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best.  But it is a strange experience,
to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests
are within the control of individuals who neither love nor
understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs
happen, he would rather be injured than obliged.  Strange, too,
for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to
observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of
triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its
objects!  There are few uglier traits of human nature than this
tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the
power of inflicting harm.  If the guillotine, as applied to
office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most
apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active
members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to
have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the
opportunity!  It appears to me--who have been a calm and curious
observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this fierce and
bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the
many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs.
The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they
need them, and because the practice of many years has made it
the law of political warfare, which unless a different system be
proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at.  But the
long habit of victory has made them generous.  They know how to
spare when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may
be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will;
nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they
have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much
reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side
rather than the triumphant one.  If, heretofore, I had been none
of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this season of peril
and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my
predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and
shame that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I
saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those
of my democratic brethren.  But who can see an inch into futurity
beyond his nose?  My own head was the first that fell.

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it,
if the sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him.  In my particular case the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had
suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable time
before it was requisite to use them.  In view of my previous
weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my
fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain
an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes,
meet with the good hap to be murdered.  In the Custom-House, as
before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years--a term long
enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones: long enough,
and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what
was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being, and
withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled
an unquiet impulse in me.  Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether
ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs--his tendency to roam, at will,
in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather
than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the
same household must diverge from one another--had sometimes made
it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend.  Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though
with no longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked
upon as settled.  Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed
more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with
which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling: and at last,
after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile
administration, to be compelled then to define his position
anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly
one.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a
week or two careering through the public prints, in my
decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and
grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought.
So much for my figurative self.  The real human being all this
time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself
to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best;
and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had
opened his long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary
man.

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play.  Rusty through long idleness, some
little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery
could be brought to work upon the tale with an effect in any
degree satisfactory.  Even yet, though my thoughts were
ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a
stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by genial
sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real
life, and undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.  This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which
the story shaped itself.  It is no indication, however, of a lack
of cheerfulness in the writer's mind: for he was happier while
straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies than at
any time since he had quitted the Old Manse.  Some of the briefer
articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise
been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and
honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from
annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone
round the circle, and come back to novelty again.  Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be
considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:
and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too
autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime,
will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond
the grave.  Peace be with all the world!  My blessing on my
friends!  My forgiveness to my enemies!  For I am in the realm of
quiet!

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me.  The
old Inspector--who, by-the-bye, I regret to say, was overthrown
and killed by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly
have lived for ever--he, and all those other venerable
personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but
shadows in my view: white-headed and wrinkled images, which my
fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever.  The
merchants--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram,
Hunt--these and many other names, which had such classic
familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of traffic,
who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world--how
little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not
merely in act, but recollection!  It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few.  Soon,
likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze
of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no
portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in
cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden
houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque
prolixity of its main street.  Henceforth it ceases to be a
reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere else.  My good
townspeople will not much regret me, for--though it has been as
dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in
this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers--there
has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary
man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind.  I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it
need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.

It may be, however--oh, transporting and triumphant
thought--that the great-grandchildren of the present race may
sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the
antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the
town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN PUMP.



THE SCARLET LETTER


I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing
hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and
studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue
and happiness they might originally project, have invariably
recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to
allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another
portion as the site of a prison.  In accordance with this rule it
may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built
the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill,
almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel.  Certain it is
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the
town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and
other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front.  The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything
else in the New World.  Like all that pertains to crime, it
seemed never to have known a youthful era.  Before this ugly
edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a
grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern,
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something
congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower
of civilised society, a prison.  But on one side of the portal,
and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush,
covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which
might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he
came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature
could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in
history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old
wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and
oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is
fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the
footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the
prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.  Finding it
so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do
otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the
reader.  It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral
blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.



II. THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain
summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by
a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with
their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the
history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the
bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured
some awful business in hand.  It could have betokened nothing
short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the
verdict of public sentiment.  But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so
indubitably be drawn.  It might be that a sluggish bond-servant,
or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the
civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post.  It
might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox
religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or
vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow
of the forest.  It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress
Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die
upon the gallows.  In either case, there was very much the same
solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as
befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly
interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public
discipline were alike made venerable and awful.  Meagre, indeed,
and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for,
from such bystanders, at the scaffold.  On the other hand, a
penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking
infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern
a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were
several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in
whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue.  The age
had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety
restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from
stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not
unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest
to the scaffold at an execution.  Morally, as well as materially,
there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six or seven generations;
for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother
had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate
and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not
character of less force and solidity than her own.  The women who
were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than
half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had
been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.
They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native
land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely
into their composition.  The bright morning sun, therefore, shone
on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and
ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had
hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New
England.  There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would
startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport
or its volume of tone.

"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind.  It would be greatly for the public behoof if
we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute,
should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester
Prynne.  What think ye, gossips?  If the hussy stood up for
judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together,
would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful
magistrates have awarded?  Marry, I trow not."

"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master
Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart
that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation."

"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful
overmuch--that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron.  "At
the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on
Hester Prynne's forehead.  Madame Hester would have winced at
that, I warrant me.  But she--the naughty baggage--little will
she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown!  Why, look
you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish
adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"

"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a
child by the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang
of it will be always in her heart."

"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of
her gown or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female,
the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these
self-constituted judges.  "This woman has brought shame upon us
all, and ought to die; is there not law for it?  Truly there is,
both in the Scripture and the statute-book.  Then let the
magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if
their own wives and daughters go astray."

"Mercy on us, goodwife!" exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there
no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of
the gallows?  That is the hardest word yet!  Hush now, gossips for
the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress
Prynne herself."

The door of the jail being flung open from within there
appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into
sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.  This
personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole
dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his
business to administer in its final and closest application to
the offender.  Stretching forth the official staff in his left
hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom
he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural
dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air as
if by her own free will.  She bore in her arms a child, a baby of
some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little
face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence,
heretofore, had brought it acquaintance only with the grey
twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the
prison.

When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully
revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to
clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse
of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a
certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress.  In
a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame
would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her
arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a
glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her
townspeople and neighbours.  On the breast of her gown, in fine
red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic
flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so
artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous
luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and
fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which was
of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but
greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of
the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a
large scale.  She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it
threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides
being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of
complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow
and deep black eyes.  She was ladylike, too, after the manner of
the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain
state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and
indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication.
And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the
antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the
prison.  Those who had before known her, and had expected to
behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were
astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone
out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she
was enveloped.  It may be true that, to a sensitive observer,
there was some thing exquisitely painful in it.  Her attire,
which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and
had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the
attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood,
by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.  But the point which
drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer--so that
both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with
Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the
first time--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically
embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom.  It had the effect of
a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity,
and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked
one of her female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this
brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it?  Why, gossips,
what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates,
and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a
punishment?"

"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames,
"if we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty
shoulders; and as for the red letter which she hath stitched so
curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel to
make a fitter one!"

"Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!" whispered their youngest
companion; "do not let her hear you!  Not a stitch in that
embroidered letter but she has felt it in her heart."

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.  "Make way,
good people--make way, in the King's name!" cried he.  "Open a
passage; and I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where
man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel
from this time till an hour past meridian.  A blessing on the
righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged
out into the sunshine!  Come along, Madame Hester, and show your
scarlet letter in the market-place!"

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators.
Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession
of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne
set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment.  A
crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of
the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran
before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare
into her face and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the
ignominious letter on her breast.  It was no great distance, in
those days, from the prison door to the market-place.  Measured
by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a
journey of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she
perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that
thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the
street for them all to spurn and trample upon.  In our nature,
however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful,
that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he
endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that
rankles after it.  With almost a serene deportment, therefore,
Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and
came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the
market-place.  It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's
earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine,
which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely
historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old
time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good
citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of
France.  It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above
it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so
fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and
thus hold it up to the public gaze.  The very ideal of ignominy
was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and
iron.  There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common
nature--whatever be the delinquencies of the individual--no
outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his
face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do.
In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in
other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain
time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about
the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was
the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.  Knowing
well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was
thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height
of a man's shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might
have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire
and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind
him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious
painters have vied with one another to represent; something
which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that
sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem
the world.  Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most
sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the
world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more
lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always
invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature,
before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead
of shuddering at it.  The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace
had not yet passed beyond their simplicity.  They were stern
enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence,
without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the
heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a
theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.  Even had there
been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must
have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of
men no less dignified than the governor, and several of his
counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town,
all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house,
looking down upon the platform.  When such personages could
constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty,
or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred
that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest
and effectual meaning.  Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and
grave.  The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman
might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes,
all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom.  It was
almost intolerable to be borne.  Of an impulsive and passionate
nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and
venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every
variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible
in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather
to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful
merriment, and herself the object.  Had a roar of laughter burst
from the multitude--each man, each woman, each little
shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts--Hester
Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful
smile.  But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to
endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out
with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the
scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was
the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or,
at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of
imperfectly shaped and spectral images.  Her mind, and especially
her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up
other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on
the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were
lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those
steeple-crowned hats.  Reminiscences, the most trifling and
immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports,
childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden
years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with
recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life;
one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of
similar importance, or all alike a play.  Possibly, it was an
instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the
exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight
and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of
view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which
she had been treading, since her happy infancy.  Standing on that
miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old
England, and her paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone,
with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated
shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility.
She saw her father's face, with its bold brow, and reverend
white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff;
her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love
which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since
her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle
remonstrance in her daughter's pathway.  She saw her own face,
glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior
of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.
There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in
years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and
bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pore over many
ponderous books.  Yet those same bleared optics had a strange,
penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the
human soul.  This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester
Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly
deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right.
Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate
and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge
cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint
in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had
awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a
new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft
of green moss on a crumbling wall.  Lastly, in lieu of these
shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan,
settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling
their stern regards at Hester Prynne--yes, at herself--who stood
on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the
letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold
thread, upon her bosom.

Could it be true?   She clutched the child so fiercely to her
breast that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at
the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to
assure herself that the infant and the shame were real.  Yes
these were her realities--all else had vanished!



III.  THE RECOGNITION

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe
and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was
at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the
crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her
thoughts.  An Indian in his native garb was standing there; but
the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English
settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice
from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have
excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind.  By the
Indian's side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with
him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized
and savage costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet
could hardly be termed aged.  There was a remarkable intelligence
in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental
part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself and
become manifest by unmistakable tokens.  Although, by a seemingly
careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had
endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was
sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this man's
shoulders rose higher than the other.  Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity
of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so
convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of
pain.  But the mother did not seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw
him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne.  It was
carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look
inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and
import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.
Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative.  A
writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake
gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all
its wreathed intervolutions in open sight.  His face darkened
with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save
at a single moment, its expression might have passed for
calmness.  After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature.  When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his
own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and
calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and
laid it on his lips.

Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him,
he addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:

"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman?--and
wherefore is she here set up to public shame?"

"You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered
the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage
companion, "else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester
Prynne and her evil doings.  She hath raised a great scandal, I
promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's church."

"You say truly," replied the other; "I am a stranger, and have
been a wanderer, sorely against my will.  I have met with
grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in
bonds among the heathen-folk to the southward; and am now
brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of my
captivity.  Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester
Prynne's--have I her name rightly?--of this woman's offences,
and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?"

"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after
your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman,
"to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched
out and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in
our godly New England.  Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the
wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had
long ago dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some good time agone he was
minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the
Massachusetts.  To this purpose he sent his wife before him,
remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.  Marry,
good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned
gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being
left to her own misguidance--"

"Ah!--aha!--I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter
smile.  "So learned a man as you speak of should have learned
this too in his books.  And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the
father of yonder babe--it is some three or four months old, I
should judge--which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"

"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the
Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the
townsman.  "Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the
magistrates have laid their heads together in vain.  Peradventure
the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown
of man, and forgetting that God sees him."

"The learned man," observed the stranger with another smile,
"should come himself to look into the mystery."

"It behoves him well if he be still in life," responded the
townsman.  "Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy,
bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and
doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, and that, moreover,
as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,
they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our
righteous law against her.  The penalty thereof is death.  But in
their great mercy and tenderness of heart they have doomed
Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the
remainder of her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her
bosom."

"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his
head.  "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the
ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone.  It irks me,
nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not at
least, stand on the scaffold by her side.  But he will be
known--he will be known!--he will be known!"

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and
whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made
their way through the crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her
pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger--so fixed
a gaze that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects
in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her.
Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than
even to meet him as she now did, with the hot mid-day sun
burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the
scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant
in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival,
staring at the features that should have been seen only in the
quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or
beneath a matronly veil at church.  Dreadful as it was, she was
conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand
witnesses.  It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him
and her, than to greet him face to face--they two alone.  She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.
Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind
her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and
solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.

"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on
which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open
gallery, appended to the meeting-house.  It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the
magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
observances in those days.  Here, to witness the scene which we
are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four
sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of
honour.  He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath--a
gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in
his wrinkles.  He was not ill-fitted to be the head and
representative of a community which owed its origin and
progress, and its present state of development, not to the
impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of
manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much,
precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.  The other
eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when
the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of
Divine institutions.  They were, doubtless, good men, just and
sage.  But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been
easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who
should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring
woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than
the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned
her face.  She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy
she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the
multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the
unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the
reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston,
a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the
profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.  This
last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than
his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of
shame than self-congratulation with him.  There he stood, with a
border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey
eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking,
like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated sunshine.  He
looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed
to old volumes of sermons, and had no more right than one of
those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did, and
meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.

"Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have striven with my
young brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have
been privileged to sit"--here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the
shoulder of a pale young man beside him--"I have sought, I say,
to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here
in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers,
and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and
blackness of your sin.  Knowing your natural temper better than
I, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of
tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness
and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide the name
of him who tempted you to this grievous fall.  But he opposes to
me--with a young man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his
years--that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force
her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and
in presence of so great a multitude.  Truly, as I sought to
convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and
not in the showing of it forth.  What say you to it, once again,
brother Dimmesdale?  Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with
this poor sinner's soul?"

There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of
the balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its
purport, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered
with respect towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:

"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this
woman's soul lies greatly with you.  It behoves you; therefore,
to exhort her to repentance and to confession, as a proof and
consequence thereof."

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd
upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--young clergyman, who had come
from one of the great English universities, bringing all the
learning of the age into our wild forest land.  His eloquence and
religious fervour had already given the earnest of high eminence
in his profession.  He was a person of very striking aspect, with
a white, lofty, and impending brow; large, brown, melancholy
eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it,
was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and
a vast power of self restraint.  Notwithstanding his high native
gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this
young minister--an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened
look--as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss
in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in
some seclusion of his own.  Therefore, so far as his duties would
permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself
simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a
freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as
many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the
Governor had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding
him speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a
woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution.  The trying nature
of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his
lips tremulous.

"Speak to the woman, my brother," said Mr. Wilson.  "It is of
moment to her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor
says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is.  Exhort
her to confess the truth!"

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer,
as it seemed, and then came forward.

"Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the balcony and looking
down steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man
says, and seest the accountability under which I labour.  If thou
feelest it to be for thy soul's peace, and that thy earthly
punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I
charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and
fellow-sufferer!  Be not silent from any mistaken pity and
tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to
step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy
pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life.  What can thy silence do for him, except it
tempt him--yea, compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin?
Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou
mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee and
the sorrow without.  Take heed how thou deniest to him--who,
perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself--the
bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!"

The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and
broken.  The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than
the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all
hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy.
Even the poor baby at Hester's bosom was affected by the same
influence, for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr.
Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms with a half-pleased,
half-plaintive murmur.  So powerful seemed the minister's appeal
that the people could not believe but that Hester Prynne would
speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one himself
in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth
by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend
the scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!"
cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before.  "That
little babe hath been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm
the counsel which thou hast heard.  Speak out the name!  That, and
thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy
breast."

"Never," replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but
into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.  "It is
too deeply branded.  Ye cannot take it off.  And would that I
might endure his agony as well as mine!"

"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly,
proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give
your child a father!"

"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised.  "And
my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an
earthly one!"

"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over
the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the
result of his appeal.  He now drew back with a long respiration.
"Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's heart!  She will
not speak!"

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind,
the elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the
occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all
its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious
letter.  So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour
or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's
heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination, and
seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal
pit.  Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal
of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as
her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too
intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter
itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the
faculties of animal life remained entire.  In this state, the
voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly,
upon her ears.  The infant, during the latter portion of her
ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she
strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to
sympathise with its trouble.  With the same hard demeanour, she
was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within
its iron-clamped portal.  It was whispered by those who peered
after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the
dark passage-way of the interior.



IV.   THE INTERVIEW

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in
a state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant
watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or
do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe.  As night
approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination
by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer,
thought fit to introduce a physician.  He described him as a man
of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and
likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach in
respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.  To
say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance,
not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the
child--who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom,
seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and
despair, which pervaded the mother's system.  It now writhed in
convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little
frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne
throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared
that individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd
had been of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet
letter.  He was lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any
offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of
disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred
with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom.  His name was
announced as Roger Chillingworth.  The jailer, after ushering him
into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative
quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child
continued to moan.

"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the
practitioner.  "Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have
peace in your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall
hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may have
found her heretofore."

"Nay, if your worship can accomplish that," answered Master
Brackett, "I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed!  Verily,
the woman hath been like a possessed one; and there lacks little
that I should take in hand, to drive Satan out of her with
stripes."

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic
quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as
belonging.  Nor did his demeanour change when the withdrawal of
the prison keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose
absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a
relation between himself and her.  His first care was given to
the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the
trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all
other business to the task of soothing her.  He examined the
infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case,
which he took from beneath his dress.  It appeared to contain
medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of
water.

"My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for
above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly
properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than
many that claim the medical degree.  Here, woman!  The child is
yours--she is none of mine--neither will she recognise my voice
or aspect as a father's.  Administer this draught, therefore,
with thine own hand."

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing
with strongly marked apprehension into his face.  "Wouldst thou
avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered she.

"Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half
soothingly.  "What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and
miserable babe?  The medicine is potent for good, and were it my
child--yea, mine own, as well as thine!  I could do no better for
it."

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state
of mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself
administered the draught.  It soon proved its efficacy, and
redeemed the leech's pledge.  The moans of the little patient
subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few
moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from
pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber.  The physician,
as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention
on the mother.  With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse,
looked into her eyes--a gaze that made her heart shrink and
shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold--and,
finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle
another draught.

"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have
learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of
them--a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some
lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus.  Drink it!  It
may be less soothing than a sinless conscience.  That I cannot
give thee.  But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy
passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea."

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow,
earnest look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet
full of doubt and questioning as to what his purposes might be.
She looked also at her slumbering child.

"I have thought of death," said she--"have wished for it--would
even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray
for anything.  Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think
again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it.  See! it is even now at my
lips."

"Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure.
"Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne?  Are my purposes
wont to be so shallow?  Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance,
what could I do better for my object than to let thee live--than
to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life--so
that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?" As he
spoke, he laid his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter, which
forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's breast, as if it had
been red hot.  He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled.
"Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes
of men and women--in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy
husband--in the eyes of yonder child!  And, that thou mayest
live, take off this draught."

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained
the cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself
on the bed, where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only
chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her.
She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt
that--having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so
it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief of
physical suffering--he was next to treat with her as the man
whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.

"Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast
fallen into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the
pedestal of infamy on which I found thee.  The reason is not far
to seek.  It was my folly, and thy weakness.  I--a man of
thought--the book-worm of great libraries--a man already in
decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of
knowledge--what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine
own?  Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself
with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical
deformity in a young girl's fantasy?  Men call me wise.  If sages
were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all
this.  I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and
dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the
very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester
Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.
Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps
together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of
that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!"

"Thou knowest," said Hester--for, depressed as she was, she
could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her
shame--"thou knowest that I was frank with thee.  I felt no love,
nor feigned any."

"True," replied he.  "It was my folly!  I have said it.  But, up
to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain.  The world had
been so cheerless!  My heart was a habitation large enough for
many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire.
I longed to kindle one!  It seemed not so wild a dream--old as I
was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was--that the
simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind
to gather up, might yet be mine.  And so, Hester, I drew thee
into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm
thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!"

"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.

"We have wronged each other," answered he.  "Mine was the first
wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and
unnatural relation with my decay.  Therefore, as a man who has
not thought and philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot
no evil against thee.  Between thee and me, the scale hangs
fairly balanced.  But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us
both!  Who is he?"

"Ask me not!" replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his
face.  "That thou shalt never know!"

"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence.  "Never know him!  Believe me, Hester,
there are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a
certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought--few things
hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and
unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.  Thou mayest cover up
thy secret from the prying multitude.  Thou mayest conceal it,
too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this
day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and
give thee a partner on thy pedestal.  But, as for me, I come to
the inquest with other senses than they possess.  I shall seek
this man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold
in alchemy.  There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of
him.  I shall see him tremble.  I shall feel myself shudder,
suddenly and unawares.  Sooner or later, he must needs be mine."

The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her,
that Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading
lest he should read the secret there at once.

"Thou wilt not reveal his name?   Not the less he is mine,"
resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one
with him.  "He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his
garment, as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart.  Yet
fear not for him!  Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's
own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the
gripe of human law.  Neither do thou imagine that I shall
contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if as
I judge, he be a man of fair repute.  Let him live!  Let him hide
himself in outward honour, if he may!  Not the less he shall be
mine!"

"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled;
"but thy words interpret thee as a terror!"

"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,"
continued the scholar.  "Thou hast kept the secret of thy
paramour.  Keep, likewise, mine!  There are none in this land that
know me.  Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call
me husband!  Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall
pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from
human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst
whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments.  No matter
whether of love or hate: no matter whether of right or wrong!
Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.  My home is where
thou art and where he is.  But betray me not!"

"Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she
hardly knew why, from this secret bond.  "Why not announce
thyself openly, and cast me off at once?"

"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the
dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman.  It
may be for other reasons.  Enough, it is my purpose to live and
die unknown.  Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one
already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come.  Recognise
me not, by word, by sign, by look!  Breathe not the secret, above
all, to the man thou wottest of.  Shouldst thou fail me in this,
beware!  His fame, his position, his life will be in my hands.
Beware!"

"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.

"Swear it!" rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he
was hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone: alone with thy
infant and the scarlet letter!  How is it, Hester?  Doth thy
sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep?  Art thou not
afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?"

"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes.  "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts
the forest round about us?  Hast thou enticed me into a bond that
will prove the ruin of my soul?"

"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile.  "No, not
thine!"



V.  HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end.  Her
prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the
sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and
morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal
the scarlet letter on her breast.  Perhaps there was a more real
torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of
the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that have
been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which
all mankind was summoned to point its finger.  Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert
the scene into a kind of lurid triumph.  It was, moreover, a
separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime,
and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might
call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many
quiet years.  The very law that condemned her--a giant of stern
features but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate,
in his iron arm--had held her up through the terrible ordeal of
her ignominy.  But now, with this unattended walk from her prison
door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and
carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or
sink beneath it.  She could no longer borrow from the future to
help her through the present grief.  Tomorrow would bring its own
trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next:
each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so
unutterably grievous to be borne.  The days of the far-off future
would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take
up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the
accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery
upon the heap of shame.  Throughout them all, giving up her
individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might
vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful
passion.  Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her,
with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast--at her, the child
of honourable parents--at her, the mother of a babe that would
hereafter be a woman--at her, who had once been innocent--as the
figure, the body, the reality of sin.  And over her grave, the
infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her--kept by
no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of
the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure--free to return
to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there
hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as
completely as if emerging into another state of being--and
having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to
her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself
with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law
that had condemned her--it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only,
she must needs be the type of shame.  But there is a fatality, a
feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of
doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger
around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still
the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.  Her
sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the
soil.  It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than
the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial
to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild
and dreary, but life-long home.  All other scenes of earth--even
that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like
garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison.
The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

It might be, too--doubtless it was so, although she hid the
secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of
her heart, like a serpent from its hole--it might be that
another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had
been so fatal.  There dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with
whom she deemed herself connected in a union that, unrecognised
on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final
judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution.  Over and over again, the
tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's
contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy
with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her.  She
barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in
its dungeon.  What she compelled herself to believe--what,
finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a
resident of New England--was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion.  Here, she said to herself had been the scene of
her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly
punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame
would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than
that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of
martyrdom.

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee.  On the outskirts of the
town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close
vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched
cottage.  It had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned,
because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while
its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that
social activity which already marked the habits of the
emigrants.  It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the
sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west.  A clump of
scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so
much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here
was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to
be, concealed.  In this little lonesome dwelling, with some
slender means that she possessed, and by the licence of the
magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her,
Hester established herself, with her infant child.  A mystic
shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.
Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be
shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh
enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or
standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or
coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and,
discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off
with a strange contagious fear.

Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth
who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of
want.  She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that
afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply
food for her thriving infant and herself.  It was the art, then,
as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp--of
needle-work.  She bore on her breast, in the curiously
embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative
skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed
themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of
human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold.  Here, indeed,
in the sable simplicity that generally characterised the
Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for
the finer productions of her handiwork.  Yet the taste of the
age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this
kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern
progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it
might seem harder to dispense with.

Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in
which a new government manifested itself to the people, were, as
a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted
ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence.  Deep
ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered
gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men
assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to
individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary
laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order.  In the array of funerals, too--whether for the apparel of
the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of
sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors--there
was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour as
Hester Prynne could supply.  Baby-linen--for babies then wore
robes of state--afforded still another possibility of toil and
emolument.

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now
be termed the fashion.  Whether from commiseration for a woman of
so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives
a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by
whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now,
sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in
vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise
have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and
fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to
occupy with her needle.  Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify
itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the
garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands.  Her
needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men
wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked
the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and
moulder away, in the coffins of the dead.  But it is not recorded
that, in a single instance, her skill was called in to embroider
the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride.
The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which
society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of
the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a
simple abundance for her child.  Her own dress was of the
coarsest materials and the most sombre hue, with only that one
ornament--the scarlet letter--which it was her doom to wear.  The
child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a
fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which
served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to
develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have
also a deeper meaning.  We may speak further of it hereafter.
Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them.  Much of the time, which she
might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she
employed in making coarse garments for the poor.  It is probable
that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation,
and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in
devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork.  She had in her
nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic--a taste for
the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite
productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the
possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon.  Women derive
a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate
toil of the needle.  To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode
of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life.
Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.  This morbid
meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it
is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but
something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong
beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in
the world.  With her native energy of character and rare
capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had
set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's heart than
that which branded the brow of Cain.  In all her intercourse with
society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she
belonged to it.  Every gesture, every word, and even the silence
of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often
expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature
by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind.  She
stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a
ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy,
nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in
manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and
horrible repugnance.  These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest
scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained
in the universal heart.  It was not an age of delicacy; and her
position, although she understood it well, and was in little
danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid
self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon
the tenderest spot.  The poor, as we have already said, whom she
sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the
hand that was stretched forth to succour them.  Dames of elevated
rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her
occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into
her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles;
and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the
sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an
ulcerated wound.  Hester had schooled herself long and well; and
she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson
that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided
into the depths of her bosom.  She was patient--a martyr, indeed
but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her
forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should
stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the
innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly
contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of
the Puritan tribunal.  Clergymen paused in the streets, to
address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its
mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.  If she
entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the
Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the
text of the discourse.  She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something
horrible in this dreary woman gliding silently through the town,
with never any companion but one only child.  Therefore, first
allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill
cries, and the utterances of a word that had no distinct purport
to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as
proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously.  It seemed to
argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of
it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had the leaves of
the trees whispered the dark story among themselves--had the
summer breeze murmured about it--had the wintry blast shrieked
it aloud!  Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new
eye.  When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter and
none ever failed to do so--they branded it afresh in Hester's
soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet
always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand.  But
then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to
inflict.  Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable.  From
first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful
agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew
callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with
daily torture.

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months,
she felt an eye--a human eye--upon the ignominious brand, that
seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were
shared.  The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a
deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had
sinned anew.  (Had Hester sinned alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a
softer moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more
so, by the strange and solitary anguish of her life.  Walking to
and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with
which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to
Hester--if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to
be resisted--she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter
had endowed her with a new sense.  She shuddered to believe, yet
could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.  She was
terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made.  What were
they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad
angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as
yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was
but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a
scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester
Prynne's?  Or, must she receive those intimations--so obscure,
yet so distinct--as truth?  In all her miserable experience,
there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense.
It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent
inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid
action.  Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a
sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or
magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship
with angels.  "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to
herself.  Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing
human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly
saint!  Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert
itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who,
according to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow
within her bosom throughout life.  That unsunned snow in the
matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's--what
had the two in common?  Or, once more, the electric thrill would
give her warning--"Behold Hester, here is a companion!" and,
looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing
at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted,
with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity were
somewhat sullied by that momentary glance.  O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing,
whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?--such
loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.  Be it
accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim
of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet
struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like
herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always
contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their
imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we
might readily work up into a terrific legend.  They averred that
the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly
dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen
glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the
night-time.  And we must needs say it seared Hester's bosom so
deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our
modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.



VI.  PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little
creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable
decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the
rank luxuriance of a guilty passion.  How strange it seemed to
the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that
became every day more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw
its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child!  Her
Pearl--for so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of
her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned
lustre that would be indicated by the comparison.  But she named
the infant "Pearl," as being of great price--purchased with all
she had--her mother's only treasure!  How strange, indeed!  Man
had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such
potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could
reach her, save it were sinful like herself.  God, as a direct
consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a
lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to
connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of
mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!  Yet these
thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension.  She knew that her deed had been evil; she could
have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good.  Day
after day she looked fearfully into the child's expanding
nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity
that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her
being.

Certainly there was no physical defect.  By its perfect shape,
its vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its
untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth
in Eden: worthy to have been left there to be the plaything of
the angels after the world's first parents were driven out.  The
child had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with
faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed
the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became
it best.  But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds.  Her
mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood
hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be
procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in
the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child
wore before the public eye.  So magnificent was the small figure
when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own
proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might
have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute
circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage floor.  And
yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play,
made a picture of her just as perfect.  Pearl's aspect was imbued
with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were
many children, comprehending the full scope between the
wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in
little, of an infant princess.  Throughout all, however, there
was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never
lost; and if in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or
paler, she would have ceased to be herself--it would have been
no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life.  Her nature
appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but--or else
Hester's fears deceived her--it lacked reference and adaptation
to the world into which she was born.  The child could not be
made amenable to rules.  In giving her existence a great law had
been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were
perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an
order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety
and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.
Hester could only account for the child's character--and even
then most vaguely and imperfectly--by recalling what she herself
had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing
her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its
material of earth.  The mother's impassioned state had been the
medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the
rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally,
they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery
lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the
intervening substance.  Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit
at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl.  She could recognize her
wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper,
and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart.  They were now illuminated by the
morning radiance of a young child's disposition, but, later in
the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and
whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more
rigid kind than now.  The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent
application of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were
used, not merely in the way of punishment for actual offences,
but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all
childish virtues.  Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the loving mother
of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of
undue severity.  Mindful, however, of her own errors and
misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was committed to her
charge.  But the task was beyond her skill.  After testing both
smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment
possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately
compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by
her own impulses.  Physical compulsion or restraint was
effectual, of course, while it lasted.  As to any other kind of
discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl
might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the
caprice that ruled the moment.  Her mother, while Pearl was yet
an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that
warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist,
persuade or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse,
sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow
of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such
moments whether Pearl was a human child.  She seemed rather an
airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a
little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a
mocking smile.  Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright,
deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and
intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and
might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not
whence and goes we know not whither.  Beholding it, Hester was
constrained to rush towards the child--to pursue the little elf
in the flight which she invariably began--to snatch her to her
bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses--not so much from
overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and
blood, and not utterly delusive.  But Pearl's laugh, when she was
caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more
doubtful than before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so
often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had
bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes
burst into passionate tears.  Then, perhaps--for there was no
foreseeing how it might affect her--Pearl would frown, and
clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a
stern, unsympathising look of discontent.  Not seldom she would
laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and
unintelligent of human sorrow.  Or--but this more rarely
happened--she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out
her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on
proving that she had a heart by breaking it.  Yet Hester was
hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness: it
passed as suddenly as it came.  Brooding over all these matters,
the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win
the master-word that should control this new and
incomprehensible intelligence.  Her only real comfort was when
the child lay in the placidity of sleep.  Then she was sure of
her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;
until--perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from
beneath her opening lids--little Pearl awoke!

How soon--with what strange rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at
an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the
mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words!  And then what a
happiness would it have been could Hester Prynne have heard her
clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other
childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own
darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of
sportive children.  But this could never be.  Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world.  An imp of evil, emblem and
product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed,
with which the child comprehended her loneliness: the destiny
that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the whole
peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other
children.  Never since her release from prison had Hester met the
public gaze without her.  In all her walks about the town, Pearl,
too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the
little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger
with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or
four footsteps to one of Hester's.  She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the
domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions
as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to
church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in
a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with
freaks of imitative witchcraft.  Pearl saw, and gazed intently,
but never sought to make acquaintance.  If spoken to, she would
not speak again.  If the children gathered about her, as they
sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny
wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,
incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because
they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some
unknown tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most
intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of
something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary
fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned them in
their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their
tongues.  Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the
bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish
bosom.  These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,
and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an
intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful
caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's
manifestations.  It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here,
again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in
herself.  All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by
inalienable right, out of Hester's heart.  Mother and daughter
stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human
society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated
those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before
Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the
softening influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted
not a wide and various circle of acquaintance.  The spell of life
went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated
itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame
wherever it may be applied.  The unlikeliest materials--a stick,
a bunch of rags, a flower--were the puppets of Pearl's
witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became
spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her
inner world.  Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary
personages, old and young, to talk withal.  The pine-trees, aged,
black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy
utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure
as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their
children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully.
It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw
her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and
dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity--soon
sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of
life--and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy.  It
was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the
northern lights.  In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and
the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more
than was observable in other children of bright faculties;
except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown
more upon the visionary throng which she created.  The
singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child
regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind.  She
never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast
the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,
against whom she rushed to battle.  It was inexpressibly
sad--then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own
heart the cause--to observe, in one so young, this constant
recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the
energies that were to make good her cause in the contest that
must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her
knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have
hidden, but which made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a
groan--"O Father in Heaven--if Thou art still my Father--what is
this being which I have brought into the world?" And Pearl,
overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtile
channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and
beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like
intelligence, and resume her play.

One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be
told.  The very first thing which she had noticed in her life,
was--what?--not the mother's smile, responding to it, as other
babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little mouth,
remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond
discussion whether it were indeed a smile.  By no means!  But that
first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was--shall we
say it?--the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom!  One day, as her
mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been
caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the
letter; and putting up her little hand she grasped at it,
smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her
face the look of a much older child.  Then, gasping for breath,
did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively
endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture
inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand.  Again,
as if her mother's agonised gesture were meant only to make
sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile.
From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had
never felt a moment's safety: not a moment's calm enjoyment of
her.  Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which
Pearl's gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter;
but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of
sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd
expression of the eyes.

Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond
of doing; and suddenly for women in solitude, and with troubled
hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions she fancied
that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another
face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye.  It was a face,
fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of
features that she had known full well, though seldom with a
smile, and never with malice in them.  It was as if an evil
spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in
mockery.  Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though
less vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls
of wild flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's
bosom; dancing up and down like a little elf whenever she hit
the scarlet letter.  Hester's first motion had been to cover her
bosom with her clasped hands.  But whether from pride or
resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought
out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat
erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild
eyes.  Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably
hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts
for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to
seek it in another.  At last, her shot being all expended, the
child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing
image of a fiend peeping out--or, whether it peeped or no, her
mother so imagined it--from the unsearchable abyss of her black
eyes.

"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.

"Oh, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and
down with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose
next freak might be to fly up the chimney.

"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the
moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was
Pearl's wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted
whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her
existence, and might not now reveal herself.

"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her
antics.

"Thou art not my child!  Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the
mother half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive
impulse came over her in the midst of her deepest suffering.
"Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither?"

"Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to
Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees.  "Do thou tell
me!"

"Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the
acuteness of the child.  Whether moved only by her ordinary
freakishness, or because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up
her small forefinger and touched the scarlet letter.

"He did not send me!" cried she, positively.  "I have no
Heavenly Father!"

"Hush, Pearl, hush!  Thou must not talk so!" answered the
mother, suppressing a groan.  "He sent us all into the world.  He
sent even me, thy mother.  Then, much more thee!  Or, if not, thou
strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?"

"Tell me!  Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but
laughing and capering about the floor.  "It is thou that must
tell me!"

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a
dismal labyrinth of doubt.  She remembered--betwixt a smile and a
shudder--the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking
vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some
of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was
a demon offspring: such as, ever since old Catholic times, had
occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their
mother's sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose.
Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a
brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom
this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England
Puritans.



VII.  THE GOVERNOR'S HALL

Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor
Bellingham, with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and
embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some
great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular
election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two
from the highest rank, he still held an honourable and
influential place among the colonial magistracy.

Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a
pair of embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to
seek an interview with a personage of so much power and activity
in the affairs of the settlement.  It had reached her ears that
there was a design on the part of some of the leading
inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in
religion and government, to deprive her of her child.  On the
supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin,
these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian
interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a
stumbling-block from her path.  If the child, on the other hand,
were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed
the elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy
all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred
to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's.  Among
those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to
be one of the most busy.  It may appear singular, and, indeed,
not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in
later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction
than that of the select men of the town, should then have been a
question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence
took sides.  At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however,
matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less
intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were
strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and
acts of state.  The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than
that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of
property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in
the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important
modification of the framework itself of the legislature.

Full of concern, therefore--but so conscious of her own right
that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on
the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of
nature, on the other--Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary
cottage.  Little Pearl, of course, was her companion.  She was now
of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and,
constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have
accomplished a much longer journey than that before her.  Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to
be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble.  We have spoken of Pearl's
rich and luxuriant beauty--a beauty that shone with deep and
vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both
of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and
which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black.  There was
fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated
offshoot of a passionate moment.  Her mother, in contriving the
child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her
imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet
tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and
flourishes of gold thread.  So much strength of colouring, which
must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter
bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the
very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the
earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of
the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and
inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester
Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom.  It was the scarlet
letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!
The mother herself--as if the red ignominy were so deeply
scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its
form--had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many
hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the
object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture.
But, in truth, Pearl was the one as well as the other; and only
in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so
perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what
passed for play with those sombre little urchins--and spoke
gravely one to another.

"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and
of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet
letter running along by her side!  Come, therefore, and let us
fling mud at them!"

But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping
her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of
threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her
enemies, and put them all to flight.  She resembled, in her
fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence--the scarlet fever,
or some such half-fledged angel of judgment--whose mission was
to punish the sins of the rising generation.  She screamed and
shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless,
caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them.  The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and
looked up, smiling, into her face.

Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham.  This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of
which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our
older towns now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy
at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences,
remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away
within their dusky chambers.  Then, however, there was the
freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered.  It had, indeed,
a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully
intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the
front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds
had been flung against it by the double handful.  The brilliancy
might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of
a grave old Puritan ruler.  It was further decorated with strange
and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the
quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco, when
newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper
and dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of
sunshine should be stripped off its front, and given her to play
with.

"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou must gather thine
own sunshine.  I have none to give thee!"

They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and
flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the
edifice, in both of which were lattice-windows, the wooden
shutters to close over them at need.  Lifting the iron hammer
that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was
answered by one of the Governor's bond servant--a free-born
Englishman, but now a seven years' slave.  During that term he
was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of
bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool.  The serf wore the
customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before,
in the old hereditary halls of England.

"Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?" inquired Hester.

"Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant, staring with
wide-open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer
in the country, he had never before seen.  "Yea, his honourable
worship is within.  But he hath a godly minister or two with him,
and likewise a leech.  Ye may not see his worship now."

"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and
the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in
the land, offered no opposition.

So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of
entrance.  With many variations, suggested by the nature of his
building materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode
of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new
habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in
his native land.  Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty
hall, extending through the whole depth of the house, and
forming a medium of general communication, more or less
directly, with all the other apartments.  At one extremity, this
spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers,
which formed a small recess on either side of the portal.  At the
other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more
powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows
which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a
deep and cushioned seat.  Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome,
probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial
literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes
on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual guest.  The
furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the
backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken
flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being
of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms,
transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home.  On the
table--in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality
had not been left behind--stood a large pewter tankard, at the
bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might
have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.

On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the
forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their
breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace.  All
were characterised by the sternness and severity which old
portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the ghosts,
rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing
with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and
enjoyments of living men.

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral
relic, but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured
by a skilful armourer in London, the same year in which Governor
Bellingham came over to New England.  There was a steel
head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget and greaves, with a pair of
gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the
helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with
white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about
upon the floor.  This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle
show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster
and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of
a regiment in the Pequod war.  For, though bred a lawyer, and
accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his
professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had
transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a
statesman and ruler.

Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming
armour as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the
house, spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the
breastplate.

"Mother," cried she, "I see you here.  Look!  Look!"

Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that,
owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet
letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions,
so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her
appearance.  In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.
Pearl pointed upwards also, at a similar picture in the
head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelligence
that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy.
That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the
mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it
made Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her
own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into
Pearl's shape.

"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her away, "Come and look
into this fair garden.  It may be we shall see flowers there;
more beautiful ones than we find in the woods."

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of
the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted
with closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and
immature attempt at shrubbery.  But the proprietor appeared
already to have relinquished as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and
amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English
taste for ornamental gardening.  Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products
directly beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor
that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament
as New England earth would offer him.  There were a few
rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the
first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage
who rides through our early annals, seated on the back of a
bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and
would not be pacified.

"Hush, child--hush!" said her mother, earnestly.  "Do not cry,
dear little Pearl!  I hear voices in the garden.  The Governor is
coming, and gentlemen along with him."

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of
persons were seen approaching towards the house.  Pearl, in utter
scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch
scream, and then became silent, not from any notion of
obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her
disposition was excited by the appearance of those new
personages.



VIII.  THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap--such as
elderly gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their
domestic privacy--walked foremost, and appeared to be showing
off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements.
The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his grey
beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused
his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a
charger.  The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe,
and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in
keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself.  But it is an
error to suppose that our great forefathers--though accustomed
to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial
and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods
and life at the behest of duty--made it a matter of conscience
to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly
within their grasp.  This creed was never taught, for instance,
by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a
snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham's shoulders, while
its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be
naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes
might possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny
garden-wall.  The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of
the English Church, had a long established and legitimate taste
for all good and comfortable things, and however stern he might
show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such
transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial
benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection
than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.

Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests--one,
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as
having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester
Prynne's disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old
Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for
two or three years past had been settled in the town.  It was
understood that this learned man was the physician as well as
friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered
of late by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labours and
duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two
steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window,
found himself close to little Pearl.  The shadow of the curtain
fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed her.

"What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with
surprise at the scarlet little figure before him.  "I profess, I
have never seen the like since my days of vanity, in old King
James's time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favour to be
admitted to a court mask!  There used to be a swarm of these
small apparitions in holiday time, and we called them children
of the Lord of Misrule.  But how gat such a guest into my hall?"

"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson.  "What little bird of
scarlet plumage may this be?  Methinks I have seen just such
figures when the sun has been shining through a richly painted
window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the
floor.  But that was in the old land.  Prithee, young one, who art
thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this
strange fashion?  Art thou a Christian child--ha?  Dost know thy
catechism?  Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom
we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of
Papistry, in merry old England?"

"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name
is Pearl!"

"Pearl?--Ruby, rather--or Coral!--or Red Rose, at the very
least, judging from thy hue!" responded the old minister,
putting forth his hand in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on
the cheek.  "But where is this mother of thine?  Ah!  I see," he
added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered, "This is
the selfsame child of whom we have held speech together; and
behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!"

"Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor.  "Nay, we might have
judged that such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman,
and a worthy type of her of Babylon!  But she comes at a good
time, and we will look into this matter forthwith."

Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall,
followed by his three guests.

"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on
the wearer of the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question
concerning thee of late.  The point hath been weightily
discussed, whether we, that are of authority and influence, do
well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul,
such as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who
hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this world.  Speak
thou, the child's own mother!  Were it not, thinkest thou, for
thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken
out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly,
and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth?  What canst
thou do for the child in this kind?"

"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!"
answered Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.

"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate.
"It is because of the stain which that letter indicates that we
would transfer thy child to other hands."

"Nevertheless," said the mother, calmly, though growing more
pale, "this badge hath taught me--it daily teaches me--it is
teaching me at this moment--lessons whereof my child may be the
wiser and better, albeit they can profit nothing to myself."

"We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we
are about to do.  Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this
Pearl--since that is her name--and see whether she hath had such
Christian nurture as befits a child of her age."

The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an
effort to draw Pearl betwixt his knees.  But the child,
unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity of any but her mother,
escaped through the open window, and stood on the upper step,
looking like a wild tropical bird of rich plumage, ready to take
flight into the upper air.  Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished
at this outbreak--for he was a grandfatherly sort of personage,
and usually a vast favourite with children--essayed, however, to
proceed with the examination.

"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy
bosom the pearl of great price.  Canst thou tell me, my child,
who made thee?"

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the
child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of
those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of
immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest.  Pearl,
therefore--so large were the attainments of her three years'
lifetime--could have borne a fair examination in the New England
Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms,
although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those
celebrated works.  But that perversity, which all children have
more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold
portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough
possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to speak
words amiss.  After putting her finger in her mouth, with many
ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the
child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but
had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that
grew by the prison-door.

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of
the Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window,
together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which
she had passed in coming hither.

Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered
something in the young clergyman's ear.  Hester Prynne looked at
the man of skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the
balance, was startled to perceive what a change had come over
his features--how much uglier they were, how his dark complexion
seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more
misshapen--since the days when she had familiarly known him.  She
met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to
give all her attention to the scene now going forward.

"This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him.  "Here
is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her!
Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its
present depravity, and future destiny!  Methinks, gentlemen, we
need inquire no further."

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her
arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a
fierce expression.  Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with
this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she
possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready
to defend them to the death.

"God gave me the child!" cried she.  "He gave her in requital of
all things else which ye had taken from me.  She is my
happiness--she is my torture, none the less!  Pearl keeps me here
in life!  Pearl punishes me, too!  See ye not, she is the scarlet
letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a
millionfold the power of retribution for my sin?  Ye shall not
take her!  I will die first!"

"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child
shall be well cared for--far better than thou canst do for it."

"God gave her into my keeping!" repeated Hester Prynne, raising
her voice almost to a shriek.  "I will not give her up!"  And here
by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr.
Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so
much as once to direct her eyes.  "Speak thou for me!" cried she.
"Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest
me better than these men can.  I will not lose the child!  Speak
for me!  Thou knowest--for thou hast sympathies which these men
lack--thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother's
rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has
but her child and the scarlet letter!  Look thou to it!  I will
not lose the child!  Look to it!"

At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester
Prynne's situation had provoked her to little less than madness,
the young minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his
hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly
nervous temperament was thrown into agitation.  He looked now
more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the
scene of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his
failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark
eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.

"There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a
voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall
re-echoed and the hollow armour rang with it--"truth in what
Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her!  God gave her
the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its
nature and requirements--both seemingly so peculiar--which no
other mortal being can possess.  And, moreover, is there not a
quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother
and this child?"

"Ay--how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the
Governor.  "Make that plain, I pray you!"

"It must be even so," resumed the minister.  "For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the
creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and
made of no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and
holy love?  This child of its father's guilt and its mother's
shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon
her heart, who pleads so earnestly and with such bitterness of
spirit the right to keep her.  It was meant for a blessing--for
the one blessing of her life!  It was meant, doubtless, the
mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture
to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an
ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy!  Hath she
not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so
forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?"

"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson.  "I feared the woman
had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"

"Oh, not so!--not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale.  "She
recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath
wrought in the existence of that child.  And may she feel,
too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was
meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive,
and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan
might else have sought to plunge her!  Therefore it is good for
this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a
being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to
be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every
moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the
Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven,
the child also will bring its parents thither!  Herein is the
sinful mother happier than the sinful father.  For Hester
Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let
us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"

"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old
Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.

"And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath
spoken," added the Rev.  Mr. Wilson.

"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham?  Hath he not
pleaded well for the poor woman?"

"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate; "and hath adduced
such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now
stands; so long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal
in the woman.  Care must be had nevertheless, to put the child to
due and stated examination in the catechism, at thy hands or
Master Dimmesdale's.  Moreover, at a proper season, the
tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to
meeting."

The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few
steps from the group, and stood with his face partially
concealed in the heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the
shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon the floor,
was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal.  Pearl, that wild
and flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his
hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a
caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother,
who was looking on, asked herself--"Is that my Pearl?" Yet she
knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it
mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her
lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as now.  The
minister--for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is
sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded
spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to
imply in us something truly worthy to be loved--the minister
looked round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated an
instant, and then kissed her brow.  Little Pearl's unwonted mood
of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering
down the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question
whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.

"The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he
to Mr. Dimmesdale.  "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly
withal!"

"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth.  "It is
easy to see the mother's part in her.  Would it be beyond a
philosopher's research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that
child's nature, and, from it make a mould, to give a shrewd
guess at the father?"

"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue
of profane philosophy," said Mr. Wilson.  "Better to fast and
pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery
as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own accord.
Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a
father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe."

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne,
with Pearl, departed from the house.  As they descended the
steps, it is averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was
thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of
Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister,
and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.

"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed
to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house.  "Wilt
thou go with us to-night?  There will be a merry company in the
forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely
Hester Prynne should make one."

"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile.  "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my
little Pearl.  Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have
gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black
Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!"

"We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning,
as she drew back her head.

But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins
and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was
already an illustration of the young minister's argument against
sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of
her frailty.  Even thus early had the child saved her from
Satan's snare.



IX.  THE LEECH

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will
remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had
resolved should never more be spoken.  It has been related, how,
in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne's ignominious
exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging
from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped
to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as
a type of sin before the people.  Her matronly fame was trodden
under all men's feet.  Infamy was babbling around her in the
public market-place.  For her kindred, should the tidings ever
reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there
remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would
not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion
with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship.
Then why--since the choice was with himself--should the
individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been the
most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate
his claim to an inheritance so little desirable?  He resolved not
to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame.  Unknown to
all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her
silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind,
and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of
life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the
ocean, whither rumour had long ago consigned him.  This purpose
once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and
likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the
Puritan town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction
than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more
than a common measure.  As his studies, at a previous period of
his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the medical
science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented
himself and as such was cordially received.  Skilful men, of the
medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in
the colony.  They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.
In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the
higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised,
and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the
intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve
art enough to comprise all of life within itself.  At all events,
the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had
aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an
aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment
were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he could
have produced in the shape of a diploma.  The only surgeon was
one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with
the daily and habitual flourish of a razor.  To such a
professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant
acquisition.  He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.  In his Indian
captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the
properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from
his patients that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the
untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own
confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned
doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the
outward forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival,
had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.
The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.  About this
period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently
begun to fail.  By those best acquainted with his habits, the
paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his
too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of
parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of
which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the
grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his
spiritual lamp.  Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were
really going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not
worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet.  He himself, on the
other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that
if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because
of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on
earth.  With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of
his decline, there could be no question of the fact.  His form
grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a
certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put
his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness,
indicative of pain.

Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the
prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all
untimely, when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town.
His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence,
dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting from the
nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily
heightened to the miraculous.  He was now known to be a man of
skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms
of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the
forest-trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was
valueless to common eyes.  He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm
Digby and other famous men--whose scientific attainments were
esteemed hardly less than supernatural--as having been his
correspondents or associates.  Why, with such rank in the learned
world, had he come hither?  What, could he, whose sphere was in
great cities, be seeking in the wilderness?  In answer to this
query, a rumour gained ground--and however absurd, was
entertained by some very sensible people--that Heaven had
wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor
of Physic from a German university bodily through the air and
setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study!
Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven
promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what
is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a
providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival.

This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the
physician ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached
himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly
regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility.
He expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but
was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken,
seemed not despondent of a favourable result.  The elders, the
deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens of
Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he should
make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill.  Mr.
Dimmesdale gently repelled their entreaties.

"I need no medicine," said he.

But how could the young minister say so, when, with every
successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his
voice more tremulous than before--when it had now become a
constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand
over his heart?  Was he weary of his labours?  Did he wish to die?
These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by
the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his church,
who, to use their own phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of
rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out.  He
listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the
physician.

"Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in
fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger
Chillingworth's professional advice, "I could be well content
that my labours, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my pains,
should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be
buried in my grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal
state, rather than that you should put your skill to the proof
in my behalf."

"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which,
whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, "it is
thus that a young clergyman is apt to speak.  Youthful men, not
having taken a deep root, give up their hold of life so easily!
And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would fain be away,
to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem."

"Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his
heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, "were I
worthier to walk there, I could be better content to toil here."

"Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly," said the
physician.

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became
the medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  As not only
the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved
to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these
two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much time
together.  For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable
the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took
long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various
walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn
wind-anthem among the tree-tops.  Often, likewise, one was the
guest of the other in his place of study and retirement.  There
was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of
science, in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation of no
moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of
ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the members of
his own profession.  In truth, he was startled, if not shocked,
to find this attribute in the physician.  Mr. Dimmesdale was a
true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment
largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself
powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage
continually deeper with the lapse of time.  In no state of
society would he have been what is called a man of liberal
views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the
pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him
within its iron framework.  Not the less, however, though with a
tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of
looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of
intellect than those with which he habitually held converse.  It
was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was
wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales
from books.  But the air was too fresh and chill to be long
breathed with comfort.  So the minister, and the physician with
him, withdrew again within the limits of what their Church
defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both
as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed
pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he
appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of
which might call out something new to the surface of his
character.  He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the
man, before attempting to do him good.  Wherever there is a heart
and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged
with the peculiarities of these.  In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought
and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork
there.  So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom,
delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and
probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker
in a dark cavern.  Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill
to follow it up.  A man burdened with a secret should especially
avoid the intimacy of his physician.  If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate
breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all is
understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined
the advantages afforded by his recognised character as a
physician;--then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of
the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but
transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the
daylight.

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes
above enumerated.  Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of
intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated
minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human
thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every topic of
ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character;
they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal
to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness
into his companion's ear.  The latter had his suspicions, indeed,
that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had
never fairly been revealed to him.  It was a strange reserve!

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of
Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were
lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the
minister's life-tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and
attached physician.  There was much joy throughout the town when
this greatly desirable object was attained.  It was held to be
the best possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare;
unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorised to do
so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels,
spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife.  This
latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur
Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all
suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his
articles of Church discipline.  Doomed by his own choice,
therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the
life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself
only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very
man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good
social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the
site on which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since
been built.  It had the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's
home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up
serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in
both minister and man of physic.  The motherly care of the good
widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny
exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create a noontide shadow
when desirable.  The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to
be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the
Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet,
in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the
scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.
Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis,
and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even
while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet
constrained often to avail themselves.  On the other side of the
house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and
laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon
even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals,
which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose.
With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons
sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly
passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual
and not incurious inspection into one another's business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as
we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of
Providence had done all this for the purpose--besought in so
many public and domestic and secret prayers--of restoring the
young minister to health.  But, it must now be said, another
portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view
of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old
physician.  When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with
its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.  When, however,
it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of
its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are
often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of
truth supernaturally revealed.  The people, in the case of which
we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger
Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious
refutation.  There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who
had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to
having seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the
affair of Overbury.  Two or three individuals hinted that the man
of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical
attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage
priests, who were universally acknowledged to be powerful
enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their
skill in the black art.  A large number--and many of these were
persons of such sober sense and practical observation that their
opinions would have been valuable in other matters--affirmed
that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable
change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his
abode with Mr. Dimmesdale.  At first, his expression had been
calm, meditative, scholar-like.  Now there was something ugly and
evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and
which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they
looked upon him.  According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his
laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed
with infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was
getting sooty with the smoke.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion
that the Rev.  Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of
special sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was
haunted either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary, in the
guise of old Roger Chillingworth.  This diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul.  No sensible man, it was
confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would turn.  The
people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come
forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he
would unquestionably win.  Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to
think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must
struggle towards his triumph.

Alas!  to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the
poor minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory
anything but secure.



X.  THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in
temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever,
and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man.
He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe
and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as
if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and
figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and
wrongs inflicted on himself.  But, as he proceeded, a terrible
fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity,
seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free
again until he had done all its bidding.  He now dug into the
poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,
rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of
a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely
to find nothing save mortality and corruption.  Alas, for his own
soul, if these were what he sought!

Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning
blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us
say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from
Bunyan's awful doorway in the hillside, and quivered on the
pilgrim's face.  The soil where this dark miner was working had
perchance shown indications that encouraged him.

"This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as
they deem him--all spiritual as he seems--hath inherited a
strong animal nature from his father or his mother.  Let us dig a
little further in the direction of this vein!"

Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and
turning over many precious materials, in the shape of high
aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls,
pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and
study, and illuminated by revelation--all of which invaluable
gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker--he would
turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another
point.  He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread,
and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a
man lies only half asleep--or, it may be, broad awake--with
purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the
apple of his eye.  In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim.  In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose
sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual
intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to
his peace had thrust itself into relation with him.  But Old
Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost
intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards
him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising,
but never intrusive friend.

Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's
character more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick
hearts are liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all
mankind.  Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize
his enemy when the latter actually appeared.  He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old
physician in his study, or visiting the laboratory, and, for
recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were
converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the
sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he
talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining
a bundle of unsightly plants.

"Where," asked he, with a look askance at them--for it was the
clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked
straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate,
"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a
dark, flabby leaf?"

"Even in the graveyard here at hand," answered the physician,
continuing his employment.  "They are new to me.  I found them
growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial
of the dead man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon
themselves to keep him in remembrance.  They grew out of his
heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was
buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during
his lifetime."

"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but
could not."

"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.

"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly
for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up
out of a buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?"

"That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours," replied the
minister.  "There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of
the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by
type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried in the human
heart.  The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must
perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall
be revealed.  Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to
understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then
to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution.  That,
surely, were a shallow view of it.  No; these revelations, unless
I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual
satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting,
on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain.  A
knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest
solution of that problem.  And, I conceive moreover, that the
hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of, will
yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a
joy unutterable."

"Then why not reveal it here?" asked Roger Chillingworth,
glancing quietly aside at the minister.  "Why should not the
guilty ones sooner avail themselves of this unutterable solace?"

"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his
breast, as if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain.
"Many, many a poor soul hath given its confidence to me, not
only on the death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair in
reputation.  And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a
relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one
who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his own
polluted breath.  How can it be otherwise?  Why should a wretched
man--guilty, we will say, of murder--prefer to keep the dead
corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at
once, and let the universe take care of it!"

"Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed the calm
physician.

"True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale.  "But not
to suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept
silent by the very constitution of their nature.  Or--can we not
suppose it?--guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a
zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from
displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men;
because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil
of the past be redeemed by better service.  So, to their own
unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures,
looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all
speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid
themselves."

"These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with
somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture
with his forefinger.  "They fear to take up the shame that
rightfully belongs to them.  Their love for man, their zeal for
God's service--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in
their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has
unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a hellish
breed within them.  But, if they seek to glorify God, let them
not lift heavenward their unclean hands!  If they would serve
their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and
reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential
self-abasement!  Would thou have me to believe, O wise and pious
friend, that a false show can be better--can be more for God's
glory, or man' welfare--than God's own truth?  Trust me, such men
deceive themselves!"

"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as
waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or
unseasonable.  He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from
any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous
temperament.--"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled
physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited
by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear,
wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the
adjacent burial-ground.  Looking instinctively from the open
window--for it was summer-time--the minister beheld Hester
Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that
traversed the enclosure.  Pearl looked as beautiful as the day,
but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which,
whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the
sphere of sympathy or human contact.  She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the
broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy--perhaps of
Isaac Johnson himself--she began to dance upon it.  In reply to
her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more
decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from
a tall burdock which grew beside the tomb.  Taking a handful of
these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter
that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their
nature was, tenaciously adhered.  Hester did not pluck them off.

Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and
smiled grimly down.

"There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for
human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that
child's composition," remarked he, as much to himself as to his
companion.  "I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor
himself with water at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.  What, in
heaven's name, is she?  Is the imp altogether evil?  Hath she
affections?  Hath she any discoverable principle of being?"

"None, save the freedom of a broken law," answered Mr.
Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the
point within himself, "Whether capable of good, I know not."

The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to
the window with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and
intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Rev.  Mr.
Dimmesdale.  The sensitive clergyman shrank, with nervous dread,
from the light missile.  Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her
little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy.  Hester Prynne,
likewise, had involuntarily looked up, and all these four
persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till
the child laughed aloud, and shouted--"Come away, mother!  Come
away, or yonder old black man will catch you!  He hath got hold
of the minister already.  Come away, mother or he will catch you!
But he cannot catch little Pearl!"

So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a
creature that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried
generation, nor owned herself akin to it.  It was as if she had
been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be
permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself
without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.

"There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a
pause, "who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that
mystery of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be
borne.  Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that
scarlet letter on her breast?"

"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman.
"Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her.  There was a look of pain
in her face which I would gladly have been spared the sight of.
But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to
be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to
cover it up in his heart."

There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine
and arrange the plants which he had gathered.

"You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length,
"my judgment as touching your health."

"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it.
Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death."

"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with
his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the
disorder is a strange one; not so much in itself nor as
outwardly manifested,--in so far, at least as the symptoms have
been laid open to my observation.  Looking daily at you, my good
sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect now for months gone
by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so
sick but that an instructed and watchful physician might well
hope to cure you.  But I know not what to say, the disease is
what I seem to know, yet know it not."

"You speak in riddles, learned sir," said the pale minister,
glancing aside out of the window.

"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I
crave pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this
needful plainness of my speech.  Let me ask as your friend, as
one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical
well being, hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly
laid open and recounted to me?"

"How can you question it?" asked the minister.  "Surely it were
child's play to call in a physician and then hide the sore!"

"You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger
Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with
intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister's face.
"Be it so!  But again!  He to whom only the outward and physical
evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which
he is called upon to cure.  A bodily disease, which we look upon
as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a
symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.  Your pardon once
again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence.  You,
sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the
closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with
the spirit whereof it is the instrument."

"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat
hastily rising from his chair.  "You deal not, I take it, in
medicine for the soul!"

"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in
an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but
standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked
minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a
sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit
hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily
frame.  Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily
evil?  How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound
or trouble in your soul?"

"No, not to thee!  not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr.
Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright,
and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth.  "Not
to thee!  But, if it be the soul's disease, then do I commit
myself to the one Physician of the soul!  He, if it stand with
His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill.  Let Him do with me
as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good.  But who art
thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself
between the sufferer and his God?"

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth
to himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile.
"There is nothing lost.  We shall be friends again anon.  But see,
now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out
of himself!  As with one passion so with another.  He hath done a
wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot
passion of his heart."

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as
heretofore.  The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy,
was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him
into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been
nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.  He
marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back
the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was
his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly
sought.  With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to
health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging
his feeble existence to that hour.  Roger Chillingworth readily
assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the
minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always
quitting the patient's apartment, at the close of the
professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon
his lips.  This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's
presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the
threshold.

"A rare case," he muttered.  "I must needs look deeper into it.
A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body!  Were it only for the
art's sake, I must search this matter to the bottom."

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares,
fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a
large black-letter volume open before him on the table.  It must
have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of
literature.  The profound depth of the minister's repose was the
more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose
sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as easily scared
away, as a small bird hopping on a twig.  To such an unwonted
remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself
that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth,
without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room.  The
physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his
hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that
hitherto had always covered it even from the professional eye.

Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.

After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror!  With what
a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only
by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through
the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even
riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he
threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon
the floor!  Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that
moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how
Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.

But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was
the trait of wonder in it!



XI.  THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was
really of another character than it had previously been.  The
intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain
path before it.  It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had
laid out for himself to tread.  Calm, gentle, passionless, as he
appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice,
hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man,
which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal
had ever wreaked upon an enemy.  To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!  All that guilty sorrow,
hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and
forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless--to him, the
Unforgiving!  All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very
man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of
vengeance!

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this
scheme.  Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly,
if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which
Providence--using the avenger and his victim for its own
purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to
punish--had substituted for his black devices.  A revelation, he
could almost say, had been granted to him.  It mattered little
for his object, whether celestial or from what other region.  By
its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.
Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very
inmost soul of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his
eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement.  He
became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor in
the poor minister's interior world.  He could play upon him as he
chose.  Would he arouse him with a throb of agony?  The victim was
for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that
controlled the engine: and the physician knew it well.  Would he
startle him with sudden fear?  As at the waving of a magician's
wand, up rose a grisly phantom--up rose a thousand phantoms--in
many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round
about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his
breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature.  True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully--even, at
times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred--at the deformed
figure of the old physician.  His gestures, his gait, his
grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself.  For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for
such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that
the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to
Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have
drawn from them, and did his best to root them out.  Unable to
accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and
thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose
to which--poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched
than his victim--the avenger had devoted himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to
the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred
office.  He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows.  His
intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of
experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life.  His fame, though still on its upward slope, already
overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen,
eminent as several of them were.  There are scholars among them,
who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected
with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and
who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such
solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother.
There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and
endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or
granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair
proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly
respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical
species.  There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose
faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books,
and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual
communications with the better world, into which their purity of
life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their
garments of mortality still clinging to them.  All that they
lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at
Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not
the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that
of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native
language.  These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's
last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of
Flame.  They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed of
seeking--to express the highest truths through the humblest
medium of familiar words and images.  Their voices came down,
afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they
habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally
belonged.  To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he
would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the
burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which
it was his doom to totter.  It kept him down on a level with the
lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the
angels might else have listened to and answered!  But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in
unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent
its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes
of sad, persuasive eloquence.  Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible!  The people knew not the power that moved them thus.
They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness.  They
fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and
rebuke, and love.  In their eyes, the very ground on which he
trod was sanctified.  The virgins of his church grew pale around
him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment,
that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly,
in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before
the altar.  The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.
Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so
rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward
before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old
bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave.
And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was
thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the
grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must
there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him.  It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and
to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight
or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within
their life.  Then what was he?--a substance?--or the dimmest of
all shadows?  He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at the
full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was.  "I,
whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood--I,
who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward,
taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with the
Most High Omniscience--I, in whose daily life you discern the
sanctity of Enoch--I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a
gleam along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall
come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest--I, who
have laid the hand of baptism upon your children--I, who have
breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the
Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted--I,
your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a
pollution and a lie!"

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken
words like the above.  More than once he had cleared his throat,
and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when
sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of
his soul.  More than once--nay, more than a hundred times--he had
actually spoken!  Spoken!  But how?  He had told his hearers that
he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the
worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable
iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his
wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning
wrath of the Almighty!  Could there be plainer speech than this?
Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous
impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?
Not so, indeed!  They heard it all, and did but reverence him the
more.  They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those
self-condemning words.  "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves.  "The saint on earth!  Alas! if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he
behold in thine or mine!"  The minister well knew--subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in which his vague
confession would be viewed.  He had striven to put a cheat upon
himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame,
without the momentary relief of being self-deceived.  He had
spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest
falsehood.  And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved
the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.  Therefore,
above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance
with the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light
of the church in which he had been born and bred.  In Mr.
Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a
bloody scourge.  Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine
had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself
the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of
that bitter laugh.  It was his custom, too, as it has been that
of many other pious Puritans, to fast--not however, like them,
in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of
celestial illumination--but rigorously, and until his knees
trembled beneath him, as an act of penance.  He kept vigils,
likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness,
sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own
face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he
could throw upon it.  He thus typified the constant introspection
wherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself.  In these
lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to
flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light
of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more
vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass.  Now it
was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the
pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of
shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but
grew more ethereal as they rose.  Now came the dead friends of
his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like
frown, and his mother turning her face away as she passed by.
Ghost of a mother--thinnest fantasy of a mother--methinks she
might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son!  And now,
through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so
ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in her
scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet
letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him.  At any moment, by
an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their
misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not
solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that
big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of
divinity.  But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest
and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt
with.  It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his,
that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities
there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the
spirit's joy and nutriment.  To the untrue man, the whole
universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing
within his grasp.  And he himself in so far as he shows himself
in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.
The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real
existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and
the undissembled expression of it in his aspect.  Had he once
found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would
have been no such man!

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at,
but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his
chair.  A new thought had struck him.  There might be a moment's
peace in it.  Attiring himself with as much care as if it had
been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he
stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued
forth.



XII.  THE MINISTER'S VIGIL

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps
actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr.
Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester
Prynne had lived through her first hours of public ignominy.  The
same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the
storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with
the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained
standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house.  The minister
went up the steps.

It was an obscure night in early May.  An unvaried pall of
cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon.
If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while
Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been
summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the
platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark
grey of the midnight.  But the town was all asleep.  There was no
peril of discovery.  The minister might stand there, if it so
pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without
other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep
into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog
his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon.  No eye
could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in
his closet, wielding the bloody scourge.  Why, then, had he come
hither?  Was it but the mockery of penitence?  A mockery, indeed,
but in which his soul trifled with itself!  A mockery at which
angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering
laughter!  He had been driven hither by the impulse of that
Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and
closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably
drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.  Poor,
miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden
itself with crime?  Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert
their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling
it off at once!  This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could
do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which
intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of
heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of
mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his
naked breast, right over his heart.  On that spot, in very truth,
there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous
tooth of bodily pain.  Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went
pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as
if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to
and fro.

"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands.  "The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me
here!"

But it was not so.  The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far
greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually
possessed.  The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy
slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a
dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that
period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely
cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air.  The
clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,
uncovered his eyes and looked about him.  At one of the
chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at
some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the
appearance of the old magistrate himself with a lamp in his hand
a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping
his figure.  He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the
grave.  The cry had evidently startled him.  At another window of
the same house, moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the
Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far off
revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face.  She
thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously
upward.  Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady
had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its
multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the
fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make
excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished.  Possibly, she went
up among the clouds.  The minister saw nothing further of her
motions.  The magistrate, after a wary observation of the
darkness--into which, nevertheless, he could see but little
further than he might into a mill-stone--retired from the
window.

The minister grew comparatively calm.  His eyes, however, were
soon greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a
long way off was approaching up the street.  It threw a gleam of
recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here
a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough
of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron
knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.  The Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly
convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in
the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the
lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal
his long-hidden secret.  As the light drew nearer, he beheld,
within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman--or, to
speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as
highly valued friend--the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr.
Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of
some dying man.  And so he had.  The good old minister came
freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had
passed from earth to heaven within that very hour.  And now
surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a
radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of
sin--as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of
his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine
of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the
triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates--now, in short, good
Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a
lighted lantern!  The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled--nay, almost
laughed at them--and then wondered if he was going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding
the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could
hardly restrain himself from speaking--

"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson.  Come up
hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"

Good Heavens!  Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken?  For one
instant he believed that these words had passed his lips.  But
they were uttered only within his imagination.  The venerable
Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully
at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his
head towards the guilty platform.  When the light of the
glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister
discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last
few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his
mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind
of lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought.  He felt his
limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the
night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the
steps of the scaffold.  Morning would break and find him there.
The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself.  The earliest
riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as
he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor.  A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another.  Then--the
morning light still waxing stronger--old patriarchs would rise
up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames,
without pausing to put off their night-gear.  The whole tribe of
decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view
with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.  Old Governor
Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James' ruff
fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams
about the glorified saints.  Hither, likewise, would come the
elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young
virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine
for him in their white bosoms, which now, by-the-bye, in their
hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves
time to cover with their kerchiefs.  All people, in a word, would
come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold.  Whom
would they discern there, with the red eastern light upon his
brow?  Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to
death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne
had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the
minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a
great peal of laughter.  It was immediately responded to by a
light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the
heart--but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute--he recognised the tones of little Pearl.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice--"Hester!  Hester Prynne!  Are you there?"

"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise;
and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the
side-walk, along which she had been passing.  "It is I, and my
little Pearl."

"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister.  "What sent you
hither?"

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne
"at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure
for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling."

"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  "Ye have both been here before, but I
was not with you.  Come up hither once again, and we will stand
all three together."

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform,
holding little Pearl by the hand.  The minister felt for the
child's other hand, and took it.  The moment that he did so,
there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life
than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were
communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system.  The
three formed an electric chain.

"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.

"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.

"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with
the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure,
that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon
him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in
which--with a strange joy, nevertheless--he now found
himself--"not so, my child.  I shall, indeed, stand with thy
mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow."

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand.  But the
minister held it fast.

"A moment longer, my child!" said he.

"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide?"

"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but another time."

"And what other time?" persisted the child.

"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister; and,
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher
of the truth impelled him to answer the child so.  "Then, and
there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I
must stand together.  But the daylight of this world shall not
see our meeting!"

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far
and wide over all the muffled sky.  It was doubtless caused by
one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the
atmosphere.  So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.
The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.  It
showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light.  The wooden houses,
with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the
garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on
either side--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things
of this world than they had ever borne before.  And there stood
the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little
Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those
two.  They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all
secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one
another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as
she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile
which made its expression frequently so elvish.  She withdrew her
hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street.  But
he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes
towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as
so many revelations from a supernatural source.  Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare.  Pestilence was known to
have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light.  We doubt
whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New
England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some
spectacle of its nature.  Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes.  Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the
faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through
the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.
It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of
heaven.  A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for
Providence to write a people's doom upon.  The belief was a
favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their
infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness.  But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on
the same vast sheet of record.  In such a case, it could only be
the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and
secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of
nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a
fitting page for his soul's history and fate.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye
and heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith,
beheld there the appearance of an immense letter--the letter
A--marked out in lines of dull red light.  Not but the meteor may
have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave
it, or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's
guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr.
Dimmesdale's psychological state at this moment.  All the time
that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless,
perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards
old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the
scaffold.  The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance
that discerned the miraculous letter.  To his feature as to all
other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or
it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at
all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked
upon his victim.  Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,
and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished
Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then
might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the
arch-fiend, standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his
own.  So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's
perception of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the
darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the
street and all things else were at once annihilated.

"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror.  "I shiver at him!  Dost thou know the man?  I hate him,
Hester!"

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister
again.  "Who is he?  Who is he?  Canst thou do nothing for me?  I
have a nameless horror of the man!"

"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"

"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close
to her lips.  "Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper."

Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like
human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be
heard amusing themselves with by the hour together.  At all
events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old
Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite
clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.
The elvish child then laughed aloud.

"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.

"Thou wast not bold!--thou wast not true!" answered the child.
"Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand,
to-morrow noon-tide!"

"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to
the foot of the platform--"pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be
you?  Well, well, indeed!  We men of study, whose heads are in our
books, have need to be straitly looked after!  We dream in our
waking moments, and walk in our sleep.  Come, good sir, and my
dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home!"

"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister,
fearfully.

"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I
knew nothing of the matter.  I had spent the better part of the
night at the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing
what my poor skill might to give him ease.  He, going home to a
better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this
light shone out.  Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend sir, else
you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow.  Aha! see
now how they trouble the brain--these books!--these books!  You
should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime, or these
night whimsies will grow upon you."

"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless,
from an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was
led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a
discourse which was held to be the richest and most powerful,
and the most replete with heavenly influences, that had ever
proceeded from his lips.  Souls, it is said, more souls than one,
were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and
vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr.
Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter.  But as he came down
the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a
black glove, which the minister recognised as his own.

"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold
where evil-doers are set up to public shame.  Satan dropped it
there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your
reverence.  But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and
always is.  A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!"

"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister, gravely, but
startled at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he
had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past
night as visionary.

"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"

"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs
handle him without gloves henceforward," remarked the old
sexton, grimly smiling.  "But did your reverence hear of the
portent that was seen last night? a great red letter in the
sky--the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel.  For,
as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night,
it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice
thereof!"

"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it."



XIII.  ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester
Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the
clergyman reduced.  His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed.  His
moral force was abased into more than childish weakness.  It
grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual
faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps
acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them.  With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from
all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate
action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's
well-being and repose.  Knowing what this poor fallen man had
once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror
with which he had appealed to her--the outcast woman--for
support against his instinctively discovered enemy.  She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid.  Little
accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her
ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself,
Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a responsibility
upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no
other, nor to the whole world besides.  The links that united her
to the rest of humankind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or
whatever the material--had all been broken.  Here was the iron
link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.  Like
all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in
which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy.
Years had come and gone.  Pearl was now seven years old.  Her
mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its
fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the
townspeople.  As is apt to be the case when a person stands out
in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time,
interferes neither with public nor individual interests and
convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up
in reference to Hester Prynne.  It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play,
it loves more readily than it hates.  Hatred, by a gradual and
quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the
change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the
original feeling of hostility.  In this matter of Hester Prynne
there was neither irritation nor irksomeness.  She never battled
with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst
usage; she made no claim upon it in requital for what she
suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.  Then, also, the
blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she
had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour.
With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no
hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only
be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor
wanderer to its paths.

It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even
the humblest title to share in the world's privileges--further
than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little
Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands--she was
quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man
whenever benefits were to be conferred.  None so ready as she to
give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even
though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital
of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments
wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a
monarch's robe.  None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence
stalked through the town.  In all seasons of calamity, indeed,
whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at
once found her place.  She came, not as a guest, but as a
rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by
trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she
was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creature.  There
glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly
ray.  Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick
chamber.  It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's bard
extremity, across the verge of time.  It had shown him where to
set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim,
and ere the light of futurity could reach him.  In such
emergencies Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich--a
well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand,
and inexhaustible by the largest.  Her breast, with its badge of
shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one.
She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say,
the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the
world nor she looked forward to this result.  The letter was the
symbol of her calling.  Such helpfulness was found in her--so
much power to do, and power to sympathise--that many people
refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original
signification.  They said that it meant Abel, so strong was
Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her.  When
sunshine came again, she was not there.  Her shadow had faded
across the threshold.  The helpful inmate had departed, without
one backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any
were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously.
Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive
their greeting.  If they were resolute to accost her, she laid
her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.  This might be
pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the
softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind.
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying
common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but
quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal
is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its
generosity.  Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal
of this nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a
more benign countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or,
perchance, than she deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were
longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities
than the people.  The prejudices which they shared in common with
the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of
reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour to expel them.  Day
by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were
relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might
grow to be an expression of almost benevolence.  Thus it was with
the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the
guardianship of the public morals.  Individuals in private life,
meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty;
nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the
token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and
dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.  "Do you see
that woman with the embroidered badge?" they would say to
strangers.  "It is our Hester--the town's own Hester--who is so
kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the
afflicted!"  Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to
tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of
another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of
bygone years.  It was none the less a fact, however, that in the
eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the
effect of the cross on a nun's bosom.  It imparted to the wearer
a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid
all peril.  Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her
safe.  It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had
drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck
it, and fell harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol--or rather, of the position in respect
to society that was indicated by it--on the mind of Hester
Prynne herself was powerful and peculiar.  All the light and
graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this
red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and
harsh outline, which might have been repulsive had she possessed
friends or companions to be repelled by it.  Even the
attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change.  It
might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and
partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners.  It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either
been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a
shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine.  It was
due in part to all these causes, but still more to something
else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's
face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though
majestic and statue like, that Passion would ever dream of
clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom to make it
ever again the pillow of Affection.  Some attribute had departed
from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her
a woman.  Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern
development, of the feminine character and person, when the
woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of
peculiar severity.  If she be all tenderness, she will die.  If
she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her,
or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply
into her heart that it can never show itself more.  The latter is
perhaps the truest theory.  She who has once been a woman, and
ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if
there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation.  We
shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched
and so transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be
attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a
great measure, from passion and feeling to thought.  Standing
alone in the world--alone, as to any dependence on society, and
with little Pearl to be guided and protected--alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to
consider it desirable--she cast away the fragment of a broken
chain.  The world's law was no law for her mind.  It was an age in
which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more
active and a wider range than for many centuries before.  Men of
the sword had overthrown nobles and kings.  Men bolder than these
had overthrown and rearranged--not actually, but within the
sphere of theory, which was their most real abode--the whole
system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of
ancient principle.  Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.  She
assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they
known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that
stigmatised by the scarlet letter.  In her lonesome cottage, by
the seashore, thoughts visited her such as dared to enter no
other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have
been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have
been seen so much as knocking at her door.

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly
often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external
regulations of society.  The thought suffices them, without
investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.  So it seemed
to be with Hester.  Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from
the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise.  Then she
might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann
Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect.  She might, in
one of her phases, have been a prophetess.  She might, and not
improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals
of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of
the Puritan establishment.  But, in the education of her child,
the mother's enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself
upon.  Providence, in the person of this little girl, had
assigned to Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood,
to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties.
Everything was against her.  The world was hostile.  The child's
own nature had something wrong in it which continually betokened
that she had been born amiss--the effluence of her mother's
lawless passion--and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness
of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little
creature had been born at all.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with
reference to the whole race of womanhood.  Was existence worth
accepting even to the happiest among them?  As concerned her own
individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative,
and dismissed the point as settled.  A tendency to speculation,
though it may keep women quiet, as it does man, yet makes her
sad.  She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her.
As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down
and built up anew.  Then the very nature of the opposite sex, or
its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to
be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume
what seems a fair and suitable position.  Finally, all other
difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of
these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone
a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal
essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have
evaporated.  A woman never overcomes these problems by any
exercise of thought.  They are not to be solved, or only in one
way.  If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.  Thus
Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy
throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind;
now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting
back from a deep chasm.  There was wild and ghastly scenery all
around her, and a home and comfort nowhere.  At times a fearful
doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to
send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as
Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.  Now, however, her
interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his
vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to
her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice
for its attainment.  She had witnessed the intense misery beneath
which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had
ceased to struggle.  She saw that he stood on the verge of
lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it.  It was
impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might
be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been
infused into it by the hand that proffered relief.  A secret
enemy had been continually by his side, under the semblance of a
friend and helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities
thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr.
Dimmesdale's nature.  Hester could not but ask herself whether
there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and
loyalty on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown
into a position where so much evil was to be foreboded and nothing
auspicious to be hoped.  Her only justification lay in the fact
that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from
a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by
acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's scheme of disguise.  Under
that impulse she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now
appeared, the more wretched alternative of the two.  She
determined to redeem her error so far as it might yet be
possible.  Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she
felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger
Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and half-maddened
by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked
together in the prison-chamber.  She had climbed her way since
then to a higher point.  The old man, on the other hand, had
brought himself nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it, by
the revenge which he had stooped for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and
do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on
whom he had so evidently set his gripe.  The occasion was not
long to seek.  One afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired
part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician with a
basket on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping along
the ground in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine
withal.



XIV.  HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water,
and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should
have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs.  So the child
flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet
went pattering along the moist margin of the sea.  Here and there
she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left
by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in.
Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening
curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image
of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited
to take her hand and run a race with her.  But the visionary
little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say--"This
is a better place; come thou into the pool."  And Pearl, stepping
in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while,
out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of
fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician.  "I would speak
a word with you," said she--"a word that concerns us much."

"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping
posture.  "With all my heart!  Why, mistress, I hear good tidings
of you on all hands!  No longer ago than yester-eve, a
magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your
affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been
question concerning you in the council.  It was debated whether
or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter
might be taken off your bosom.  On my life, Hester, I made my
intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done
forthwith."

"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the
badge," calmly replied Hester.  "Were I worthy to be quit of it,
it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into
something that should speak a different purport."

"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A
woman must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of
her person.  The letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right
bravely on your bosom!"

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man,
and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a
change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years.  It
was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces
of advancing life were visible he bore his age well, and seemed
to retain a wiry vigour and alertness.  But the former aspect of
an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what
she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been
succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully
guarded look.  It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this
expression with a smile, but the latter played him false, and
flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator could
see his blackness all the better for it.  Ever and anon, too,
there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old
man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within
his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown
into a momentary flame.  This he repressed as speedily as
possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had
happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will
only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's
office.  This unhappy person had effected such a transformation
by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of
a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and
adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and
gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom.  Here was
another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to
her.

"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look
at it so earnestly?"

"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears
bitter enough for it," answered she.  "But let it pass!  It is of
yonder miserable man that I would speak."

"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he
loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it
with the only person of whom he could make a confidant.  "Not to
hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to
be busy with the gentleman.  So speak freely and I will make
answer."

"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years
ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as
touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me.  As the
life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed
no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your
behest.  Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus
bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human
beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something
whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep
your counsel.  Since that day no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep.  You are beside him,
sleeping and waking.  You search his thoughts.  You burrow and
rankle in his heart!  Your clutch is on his life, and you cause
him to die daily a living death, and still he knows you not.  In
permitting this I have surely acted a false part by the only man
to whom the power was left me to be true!"

"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth.  "My finger,
pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into
a dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"

"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.

"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth
again.  "I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever
physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as
I have wasted on this miserable priest!  But for my aid his life
would have burned away in torments within the first two years
after the perpetration of his crime and thine.  For, Hester, his
spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine
has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter.  Oh, I could
reveal a goodly secret!  But enough.  What art can do, I have
exhausted on him.  That he now breathes and creeps about on earth
is owing all to me!"

"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.

"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth,
letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes.
"Better had he died at once!  Never did mortal suffer what this
man has suffered.  And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy!
He has been conscious of me.  He has felt an influence dwelling
always upon him like a curse.  He knew, by some spiritual
sense--for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as
this--he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his
heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him,
which sought only evil, and found it.  But he knew not that the
eye and hand were mine!  With the superstition common to his
brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be
tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting
of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits
him beyond the grave.  But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most
vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this
perpetual poison of the direst revenge!  Yea, indeed, he did not
err, there was a fiend at his elbow!  A mortal man, with once a
human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment."

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted
his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some
frightful shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the
place of his own image in a glass.  It was one of those
moments--which sometimes occur only at the interval of
years--when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his
mind's eye.  Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as
he did now.

"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look.  "Has he not paid thee all?"

"No, no!  He has but increased the debt!" answered the
physician, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer
characteristics, and subsided into gloom.  "Dost thou remember
me, Hester, as I was nine years agone?  Even then I was in the
autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.  But all my life
had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years,
bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and
faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the
other--faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.  No life
had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich
with benefits conferred.  Dost thou remember me?  Was I not,
though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for
others, craving little for himself--kind, true, just and of
constant, if not warm affections?  Was I not all this?"

"All this, and more," said Hester.

"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his
features.  "I have already told thee what I am--a fiend!  Who made
me so?"

"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering.  "It was I, not less
than he.  Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"

"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger
Chillingworth.  "If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!"

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.

"I judged no less," said the physician.  "And now what wouldst
thou with me touching this man?"

"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly.  "He must
discern thee in thy true character.  What may be the result I
know not.  But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him,
whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid.  So far
as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and
his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands.
Nor do I--whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth,
though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the
soul--nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer
a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy.  Do with him as thou wilt!  There is no good for him, no
good for me, no good for thee.  There is no good for little
Pearl.  There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze."

"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth,
unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a
quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed.
"Thou hadst great elements.  Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier
with a better love than mine, this evil had not been.  I pity
thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature."

"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend!  Wilt thou yet purge
it out of thee, and be once more human?  If not for his sake,
then doubly for thine own!  Forgive, and leave his further
retribution to the Power that claims it!  I said, but now, that
there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are
here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and
stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn
our path.  It is not so!  There might be good for thee, and thee
alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy
will to pardon.  Wilt thou give up that only privilege?  Wilt thou
reject that priceless benefit?"

"Peace, Hester--peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy
sternness--"it is not granted me to pardon.  I have no such power
as thou tellest me of.  My old faith, long forgotten, comes back
to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer.  By thy
first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since
that moment it has all been a dark necessity.  Ye that have
wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion;
neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from
his hands.  It is our fate.  Let the black flower blossom as it
may!  Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man."

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.



XV.  HESTER AND PEARL

So Roger Chillingworth--a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked--took leave of
Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth.  He
gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it
into the basket on his arm.  His gray beard almost touched the
ground as he crept onward.  Hester gazed after him a little
while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether
the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath
him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and
brown, across its cheerful verdure.  She wondered what sort of
herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather.
Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the
sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species
hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers?  Or
might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be
converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch?
Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really
fall upon him?  Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of
ominous shadow moving along with his deformity whichever way he
turned himself?  And whither was he now going?  Would he not
suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot,
where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade,
dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the
climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?
Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much
the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?

"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she
gazed after him, "I hate the man!"

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome
or lessen it.  Attempting to do so, she thought of those
long-past days in a distant land, when he used to emerge at
eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the
firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile.
He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that
the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken
off the scholar's heart.  Such scenes had once appeared not
otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal
medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her
ugliest remembrances.  She marvelled how such scenes could have
been!  She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him!  She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that
she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his
hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle
and melt into his own.  And it seemed a fouler offence committed
by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him,
that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had
persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me!  He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart!  Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality.  But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice.  What did it betoken?  Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery
and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after
the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark
light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might
not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!  Where are you?"

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no
loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer
of herbs.  At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully
with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom
forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for
herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable
sky.  Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was
unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.  She made little
boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,
and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant
in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the
shore.  She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize
of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in
the warm sun.  Then she took up the white foam that streaked the
line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great
snowflakes ere they fell.  Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that
fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up
her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after
these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting
them.  One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was
almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a
broken wing.  But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her
sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little
being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl
herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus
assume the aspect of a little mermaid.  She inherited her
mother's gift for devising drapery and costume.  As the last
touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and
imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration
with which she was so familiar on her mother's.  A letter--the
letter A--but freshly green instead of scarlet.  The child bent
her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with
strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she
had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?" thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as
lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester
Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the
ornament upon her bosom.

"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the
green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport.  But
dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy
mother is doomed to wear?"

"Yes, mother," said the child.  "It is the great letter A.  Thou
hast taught me in the horn-book."

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there
was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in
her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl
really attached any meaning to the symbol.  She felt a morbid
desire to ascertain the point.

"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"

"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's
face.  "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the
absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but on second
thoughts turning pale.

"What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?"

"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more
seriously than she was wont to speak.  "Ask yonder old man whom
thou hast been talking with,--it may be he can tell.  But in good
earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter
mean?--and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?--and why does the
minister keep his hand over his heart?"

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and
capricious character.  The thought occurred to Hester, that the
child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike
confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as
she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy.  It
showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect.  Heretofore, the mother,
while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection,
had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the
waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy
sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is
petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses
you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which
misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss
your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently
with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business,
leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart.  And this, moreover, was
a mother's estimate of the child's disposition.  Any other
observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have
given them a far darker colouring.  But now the idea came
strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable
precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age
when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as
much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without
irreverence either to the parent or the child.  In the little
chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging and
could have been from the very first--the steadfast principles of
an unflinching courage--an uncontrollable will--sturdy pride,
which might be disciplined into self-respect--and a bitter scorn
of many things which, when examined, might be found to have the
taint of falsehood in them.  She possessed affections, too,
though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest
flavours of unripe fruit.  With all these sterling attributes,
thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother
must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this
elfish child.

Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the
scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being.  From the
earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this
as her appointed mission.  Hester had often fancied that
Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing
the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had
she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design,
there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence.
If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a
spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be
her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her
mother's heart, and converted it into a tomb?--and to help her
to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead
nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's
mind, with as much vivacity of impression as if they had
actually been whispered into her ear.  And there was little
Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both her
own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching
questions, once and again, and still a third time.

"What does the letter mean, mother?  and why dost thou wear it?
and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"

"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself.  "No!  if this be
the price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it."

Then she spoke aloud--

"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these?  There are
many things in this world that a child must not ask about.  What
know I of the minister's heart?  And as for the scarlet letter, I
wear it for the sake of its gold thread."

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before
been false to the symbol on her bosom.  It may be that it was the
talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who
now forsook her; as recognising that, in spite of his strict
watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some
old one had never been expelled.  As for little Pearl, the
earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop.  Two or
three times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often
at supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and
once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with
mischief gleaming in her black eyes.

"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?"

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of
being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and
making that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably
connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter--

"Mother!--Mother!--Why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?"

"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before.  "Do not
tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!"



XVI.  A FOREST WALK

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to
Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior
consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into
his intimacy.  For several days, however, she vainly sought an
opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks
which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along the shores
of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring
country.  There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to
the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited
him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by
the scarlet letter.  But, partly that she dreaded the secret or
undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly
that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none could
have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would
need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked
together--for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting
him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.

At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev.  Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that
he had gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among
his Indian converts.  He would probably return by a certain hour
in the afternoon of the morrow.  Betimes, therefore, the next
day, Hester took little Pearl--who was necessarily the companion
of all her mother's expeditions, however inconvenient her
presence--and set forth.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula
to the mainland, was no other than a foot-path.  It straggled
onward into the mystery of the primeval forest.  This hemmed it
in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and
disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to
Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which
she had so long been wandering.  The day was chill and sombre.
Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however,
by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now
and then be seen at its solitary play along the path.  This
flitting cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of
some long vista through the forest.  The sportive
sunlight--feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant
pensiveness of the day and scene--withdrew itself as they came
nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier,
because they had hoped to find them bright.

"Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you.
It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something
on your bosom.  Now, see!  There it is, playing a good way off.
Stand you here, and let me run and catch it.  I am but a child.
It will not flee from me--for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"

"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.

"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race.  "Will not it come of its own accord when
I am a woman grown?"

"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine.
It will soon be gone."

Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to
perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in
the midst of it, all brightened by its splendour, and
scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion.  The
light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a
playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step
into the magic circle too.

"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.

"See!" answered Hester, smiling; "now I can stretch out my hand
and grasp some of it."

As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge
from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features,
her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it
into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about
her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade.  There
was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense
of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never
failing vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness,
which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with
the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.  Perhaps
this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy
with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl's
birth.  It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard,
metallic lustre to the child's character.  She wanted--what some
people want throughout life--a grief that should deeply touch
her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy.  But
there was time enough yet for little Pearl.

"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot
where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine--"we will sit down a
little way within the wood, and rest ourselves."

"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl.  "But you
may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile."

"A story, child!" said Hester.  "And about what?"

"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold
of her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half
mischievously, into her face.

"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big,
heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers
his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among
the trees; and they are to write their names with their own
blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms.  Didst thou
ever meet the Black Man, mother?"

"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother,
recognising a common superstition of the period.

"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where
you watched last night," said the child.  "But she fancied me
asleep while she was talking of it.  She said that a thousand and
a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book,
and have his mark on them.  And that ugly tempered lady, old
Mistress Hibbins, was one.  And, mother, the old dame said that
this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that
it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight,
here in the dark wood.  Is it true, mother?  And dost thou go to
meet him in the nighttime?"

"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.
"Not that I remember," said the child.  "If thou fearest to leave
me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee.  I
would very gladly go!  But, mother, tell me now!  Is there such a
Black Man?  And didst thou ever meet him?  And is this his mark?"

"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her
mother.

"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.

"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother.  "This
scarlet letter is his mark!"

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger
along the forest track.  Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap
of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been
a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade,
and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.  It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising
gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst,
over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.  The trees impending
over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which
choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black
depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier
passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown,
sparkling sand.  Letting the eyes follow along the course of the
stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at
some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces
of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and
here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens.  All
these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on
making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing,
perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should
whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it
flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool.  Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like
the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without
playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance
and events of sombre hue.

"Oh, brook!  Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried
Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad?
Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and
murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the
forest trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it
could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else
to say.  Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of
her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom.  But, unlike the
little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily
along her course.

"What does this sad little brook say, mother?" inquired she.

"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee
of it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine.
But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise
of one putting aside the branches.  I would have thee betake
thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes
yonder."

"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.

"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not
stray far into the wood.  And take heed that thou come at my
first call."

"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt
thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big
book under his arm?"

"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently.  "It is no Black
Man!  Thou canst see him now, through the trees.  It is the
minister!"

"And so it is!" said the child.  "And, mother, he has his hand
over his heart!  Is it because, when the minister wrote his name
in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place?  But why
does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?"

"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another
time," cried Hester Prynne.  "But do not stray far.  Keep where
thou canst hear the babble of the brook."

The child went singing away, following up the current of the
brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its
melancholy voice.  But the little stream would not be comforted,
and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very
mournful mystery that had happened--or making a prophetic
lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the
verge of the dismal forest.  So Pearl, who had enough of shadow
in her own little life, chose to break off all acquaintance with
this repining brook.  She set herself, therefore, to gathering
violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she
found growing in the crevice of a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or
two towards the track that led through the forest, but still
remained under the deep shadow of the trees.  She beheld the
minister advancing along the path entirely alone, and leaning on
a staff which he had cut by the wayside.  He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which
had never so remarkably characterised him in his walks about the
settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself
liable to notice.  Here it was wofully visible, in this intense
seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy
trial to the spirits.  There was a listlessness in his gait, as
if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any
desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of
anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree,
and lie there passive for evermore.  The leaves might bestrew
him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock
over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no.
Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no
symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as
little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.



XVII.   THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before
Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his
observation.  At length she succeeded.

"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first, then louder,
but hoarsely--"Arthur Dimmesdale!"

"Who speaks?" answered the minister.  Gathering himself quickly
up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood
to which he was reluctant to have witnesses.  Throwing his eyes
anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld
a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so
little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded
sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he
knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow.  It may be that his
pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had
stolen out from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester!  Hester Prynne!", said he; "is it thou?  Art thou in
life?"

"Even so." she answered.  "In such life as has been mine these
seven years past!  And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet
live?"

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual
and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own.  So
strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the
first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who
had been intimately connected in their former life, but now
stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar
with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied
beings.  Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.  They
were awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis
flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each
heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at
such breathless epochs.  The soul beheld its features in the
mirror of the passing moment.  It was with fear, and tremulously,
and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur
Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the
chill hand of Hester Prynne.  The grasp, cold as it was, took
away what was dreariest in the interview.  They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken--neither he nor she assuming the
guidance, but with an unexpressed consent--they glided back into
the shadow of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat down
on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting.
When they found voice to speak, it was at first only to utter
remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances might have
made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next,
the health of each.  Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step
by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their
hearts.  So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed
something slight and casual to run before and throw open the
doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led
across the threshold.

After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.

"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

"Hast thou?" she asked.

"None--nothing but despair!" he answered.  "What else could I
look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine?  Were
I an atheist--a man devoid of conscience--a wretch with coarse
and brutal instincts--I might have found peace long ere now.
Nay, I never should have lost it.  But, as matters stand with my
soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all
of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers
of spiritual torment.  Hester, I am most miserable!"

"The people reverence thee," said Hester.  "And surely thou
workest good among them!  Doth this bring thee no comfort?"

"More misery, Hester!--Only the more misery!" answered the
clergyman with a bitter smile.  "As concerns the good which I may
appear to do, I have no faith in it.  It must needs be a
delusion.  What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the
redemption of other souls?--or a polluted soul towards their
purification?  And as for the people's reverence, would that it
were turned to scorn and hatred!  Canst thou deem it, Hester, a
consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many
eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were
beaming from it!--must see my flock hungry for the truth, and
listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking!--and then look inward, and discern the black reality
of what they idolise?  I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of
heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!  And
Satan laughs at it!"

"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.  "You have
deeply and sorely repented.  Your sin is left behind you in the
days long past.  Your present life is not less holy, in very
truth, than it seems in people's eyes.  Is there no reality in
the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?  And
wherefore should it not bring you peace?"

"No, Hester--no!" replied the clergyman.  "There is no substance
in it!  It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me!  Of
penance, I have had enough!  Of penitence, there has been none!
Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock
holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me
at the judgment-seat.  Happy are you, Hester, that wear the
scarlet letter openly upon your bosom!  Mine burns in secret!
Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a
seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for
what I am!  Had I one friend--or were it my worst enemy!--to
whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could
daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners,
methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby.  Even thus much
of truth would save me!  But now, it is all falsehood!--all
emptiness!--all death!"

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak.
Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he
did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances
in which to interpose what she came to say.  She conquered her
fears, and spoke:

"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she,
"with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of
it!"  Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an
effort.--"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with
him, under the same roof!"

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and
clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his
bosom.

"Ha!  What sayest thou?" cried he.  "An enemy!  And under mine
own roof!  What mean you?"

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for
which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him
to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at
the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than
malevolent.  The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the
magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.
There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom.  But of late, since the night
of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated.  She now read his heart more
accurately.  She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth--the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all
the air about him--and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual
infirmities--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a
cruel purpose.  By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not
to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being.  Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once--nay,
why should we not speak it?--still so passionately loved!  Hester
felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death
itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have
been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had
taken upon herself to choose.  And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on
the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.

"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me!  In all things else, I
have striven to be true!  Truth was the one virtue which I might
have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save
when thy good--thy life--thy fame--were put in question!  Then I
consented to a deception.  But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side!  Dost thou not see what I would
say?  That old man!--the physician!--he whom they call Roger
Chillingworth!--he was my husband!"

The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that
violence of passion, which--intermixed in more shapes than one
with his higher, purer, softer qualities--was, in fact, the
portion of him which the devil claimed, and through which he
sought to win the rest.  Never was there a blacker or a fiercer
frown than Hester now encountered.  For the brief space that it
lasted, it was a dark transfiguration.  But his character had
been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower
energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle.  He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.

"I might have known it," murmured he--"I did know it!  Was not
the secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the
first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since?  Why
did I not understand?  Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little, little
knowest all the horror of this thing!  And the shame!--the
indelicacy!--the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick
and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!--I cannot forgive
thee!"

"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the
fallen leaves beside him.  "Let God punish!  Thou shalt forgive!"

With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around
him, and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring
though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter.  He would have
released himself, but strove in vain to do so.  Hester would not
set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face.  All
the world had frowned on her--for seven long years had it
frowned upon this lonely woman--and still she bore it all, nor
ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes.  Heaven, likewise, had
frowned upon her, and she had not died.  But the frown of this
pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester
could not bear, and live!

"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again.
"Wilt thou not frown?  Wilt thou forgive?"

"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with
a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger.  "I
freely forgive you now.  May God forgive us both.  We are not,
Hester, the worst sinners in the world.  There is one worse than
even the polluted priest!  That old man's revenge has been
blacker than my sin.  He has violated, in cold blood, the
sanctity of a human heart.  Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"

"Never, never!" whispered she.  "What we did had a consecration
of its own.  We felt it so!  We said so to each other.  Hast thou
forgotten it?"

"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.
"No; I have not forgotten!"

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on
the mossy trunk of the fallen tree.  Life had never brought them
a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so
long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along--and
yet it unclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim
another, and another, and, after all, another moment.  The forest
was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was
passing through it.  The boughs were tossing heavily above their
heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another,
as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or
constrained to forbode evil to come.

And yet they lingered.  How dreary looked the forest-track that
led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up
again the burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow
mockery of his good name!  So they lingered an instant longer.  No
golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark
forest.  Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not
burn into the bosom of the fallen woman!  Here seen only by her
eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one
moment true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror!  Roger Chillingworth
knows your purpose to reveal his true character.  Will he
continue, then, to keep our secret?  What will now be the course
of his revenge?"

"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices
of his revenge.  I deem it not likely that he will betray the
secret.  He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark
passion."

"And I!--how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with
this deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking
within himself, and pressing his hand nervously against his
heart--a gesture that had grown involuntary with him.  "Think for
me, Hester!  Thou art strong.  Resolve for me!"

"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly
and firmly.  "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"

"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister.  "But how
to avoid it?  What choice remains to me?  Shall I lie down again
on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst
tell me what he was?  Must I sink down there, and die at once?"

"Alas!  what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the
tears gushing into her eyes.  "Wilt thou die for very weakness?
There is no other cause!"

"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest.  "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"

"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it."

"Be thou strong for me!" answered he.  "Advise me what to do."

"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing
her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a
magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it
could hardly hold itself erect.  "Doth the universe lie within
the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but
a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us?  Whither leads
yonder forest-track?  Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!
Yes; but, onward, too!  Deeper it goes, and deeper into the
wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some
few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the
white man's tread.  There thou art free!  So brief a journey would
bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to
one where thou mayest still be happy!  Is there not shade enough
in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth?"

"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the
minister, with a sad smile.

"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester.
"It brought thee hither.  If thou so choose, it will bear thee
back again.  In our native land, whether in some remote rural
village, or in vast London--or, surely, in Germany, in France,
in pleasant Italy--thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge!  And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and
their opinions?  They have kept thy better part in bondage too
long already!"

"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were
called upon to realise a dream.  "I am powerless to go.  Wretched
and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on
my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed
me.  Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for
other human souls!  I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful
sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his
dreary watch shall come to an end!"

"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own
energy.  "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee!  It shall not
cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path:
neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to
cross the sea.  Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath
happened.  Meddle no more with it!  Begin all anew!  Hast thou
exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial?  Not so!
The future is yet full of trial and success.  There is happiness
to be enjoyed!  There is good to be done!  Exchange this false
life of thine for a true one.  Be, if thy spirit summon thee to
such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men.  Or, as
is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and
the most renowned of the cultivated world.  Preach!  Write!  Act!
Do anything, save to lie down and die!  Give up this name of
Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one,
such as thou canst wear without fear or shame.  Why shouldst thou
tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so
gnawed into thy life? that have made thee feeble to will and to
do? that will leave thee powerless even to repent?  Up, and
away!"

"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful
light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away,
"thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are
tottering beneath him!  I must die here!  There is not the
strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange,
difficult world alone!"

It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken
spirit.  He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed
within his reach.

He repeated the word--"Alone, Hester!"

"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!



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"





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Scarlet Letter" ***

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