ars Rare agit bist, _t Sl gudshat. $4} ean B reeiastort san naraeauateu ts Ftisdaed alee phhietetely ish te be hee 84: i+ aes [Pisusoee4 re pers py ahaa y Rese re FDA BR r yore pe twee ee et Poe eb Pee +Fb-pega fae oh 5 Peete hte pane ng oe 1) Yor by 7 hos TPS a err 2.5 acne 4 ’ ArT re Rat eames Vee % . rie A oie Shes [opel ge sel de ay - bopesth Reeth foeaitartate re Devt sTaepocea digtebacteree f as + Sat in we tee tea gees ha oy 5m git aier guy saa ra ay saree ete en aay eek Be hy Ae Fs roan peewee sada PSE aC Roa Rt Ns AU sae ar mea par og Petree; Paras ae pie tg Te leat oe aa em Sonne aac PET SL Settee its tee iva nietav bp apg eytopee re yee saereg Nhat datas E Seating eta regent geen be phe Byer bd thea peel fee y Dh eee oN xn Say tea thay OA omer oeerca! % ¥ . + 7 4 0 aanagel = = : = = = = = SS y = So ii aiegkaY - = 5 -— . F ’ os 4 * Ce a a a ; - = — > . ° | t om od Sea rte . 3 ~ — y : : | = * * —+ = r ie ¥. Tae 3 — . i oe A noe ae : = . | 3 : : - Kk : : \ eel a = 2 = J % om eS +: re; a : , petty 2 e . . 4 ; a . wo ion — q ; | | == v= = - : 3 = 2 7 € 4 : “ - ¢ z 7 | 3 ; a ¥ —— t v : a | | = = > = ¢ , : : te a = \ . | ; > Ss af _ | | Me sae U ~ . : ; | < i a = as = = > : F = Ae — “ = > ‘ mH GCA RMR iets GER THE MODERN LIBRARY OURS EH SE 7.0" RL) D380 BEES) Ts) BLO) 0 Kas. Lhe publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LIBRARY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/scarletletterOOhawt_9 | i Le » DEC 30 1049 , & woaion, sew by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Introduction by WILLIAM LYON PHELP& THE MODERN LIBRARY NEW YORK Random House IS THE PUBLISHER OF THE (MO DERN BRA BENNETT A. CERF - DONALD S. KLOPFER - ROBERT K. HAAS Manufactured in the United States of America Printed by Parkway Printing Company Bound by H. Wolff ~ PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Mucu to the author’s surprise, and (if he may Say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, in- troductory to THe Scartet Lerrer, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs leave to say that he has carefully read over the intro- ductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge what- ever might be found amiss, and to make the best repara- tion in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged cuilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill-feel- ing of any kind, personal or political, he utterly dis- claims such motives. The sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detri- ment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, v vi PREFACE [O THE SECOND EDITION he conceives that it could not have been done in a bet- ter or a kindlier spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth. The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch without the change of a word. Satem. March 30, 1850. ¢ CONTENTS PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION INTRODUCTION THE Custom-House. Be neecancrory CHAPTER i ig Ly LV Ve VI. : PE eld aunts! Wee f . THE Extr-CHILD AND THE Minceae THE Prison-Door THE MarKET-PLACE THE RECOGNITION Tue INTERVIEW HESTER AT HER NEEDLE PEARL THe LEECH ? : ‘Dre IcRECH AND) Eis Biren . THE INTERIOR OF A HEART . THE MINISTER’S VIGIL . ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER . HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN HESTER AND PEARL . . A Forest WALK . THE PASTOR AND HIS Pnonan . A FLoop oF SUNSHINE . THE CHILD AT THE BrooxK-SIpE Tue MINISTER IN A MAzeE . Tue NEw ENGLAND Ho.LipAy . THE PROCESSION . THE REVELATION OF THE Seas ears . CONCLUSION . 1 va ./ if OM pea we INTRODUCTION HAWTHORNE is the most consummate literary artist in American literature, and The Scarlet Letter is the greatest book ever written in the Western Hemisphere. It is not relatively, but absolutely great; it holds its place among the fifteen best novels of the world. As so much American literature is both second-rate and second-hand, rising above mediocrity when most imi- tative, and shaggy with crudity when most original, it is well to remember that in The Scarlet Letter we have a work of art profoundly original in conception and design, profound in its revelation and interpre- tation of human nature, accurate in its historical set- ting and written in a style almost impeccable. Hawthorne was, as Hutton called him, “The ghost of New England”; he came of a long line of Puritan ancestors, he was born at Salem in 1804, he was grad- uated at Bowdoin College, spent twelve lonely years in one room learning to write, married exactly the right kind of wife, and had that shyness and uncon- querable reserve that sometimes accompany the artistic temperament. Politically and socially, he had a genius for the inopportune; he was born on the Fourth of July, he remained a Democrat when nearly all his intimate friends were Abolitionists, and when Emer- son declared that John Brown had made the gallows as memorable as the Cross, Hawthorne remarked, “No man was ever more justly hanged.” ix x INTRODUCTION Upon his New England and Puritan foundation, he superimposed seven years’ residence in Europe, and died in 1864. When he lost his position in the Custom House at Salem, he came home in despondency, and told his wife that his occupation was gone. To his surprise, she greeted this information with delight, and said, “Now you can write your book.” “And what shall we live on while I am writing it?’ Her reply was to exhibit a little hoard of money which she had saved from the meagre weekly wage he-had given her for household expenses. She told him she had always known he was a genius, and that the time would come when it would be necessary for him to have leisure. In a year he wrote The Scarlet Letter (1850). Its greatness was instantly recognised; he found himselt famous. In 1851 the German translation appeared, and in 1853 the French. It has been translated into all the leading languages of the world, has been drama- tised, made into a grand opera, and lately received the dubious honour of the screen. Hawthorne is original in his background; it is a background of sombre greys and browns, on which his brilliant figures stand out in sharp relief. There is a shadowy region which he has made entirely his own. It is not the ghoul-haunted region of Weir, for there is little in common between Poe and Hawthorne, however inevitable the comparison. The difference is that between the physical and the spiritual; Poe is uncanny, high-pitched, sensatfonal; Hawthorne is sub- dued and subtle. To read him is to experience a change in the atmosphere rather than a change in the scenery. His world of shadows is quite terrestrial; we do not INTRODUCTION xi really leave the earth. Over his creations hangs a thin veil of fantasy, poetry, romance, and we see his char- acters through this transparent, gossamer, silver-grey mist, analogous to the light covering the pictures of Andrea del Sarto. This atmosphere is never ‘‘worked- up,’ nor can it possibly be detached from the story, any more than the air can be lifted off the grass. Hawthorne is an ideal realist. He is not a romances writer, like Cooper; he is not primarily interested in happenings and adventures. Yet he is by no means a realist like Zola, nor for that matter like George Eliot; perhaps Turgenev more nearly resembles him than any other writer. It is realism seen through a poetic medium. The Introduction on the Custom House—which building was unfortunately burned in 1921—was writ- ten I suppose mainly to relieve his own mind. Here his ironical humour found a subject made to his hand. Little did the bench-warmers who decorated his office suspect that the shy man was shrewdly judging them, and storing them up for literary material. As so often happens, both parties in these casual conversations regarded the other with secret contempt. Hawthorne’s advantage was in having an outlet. Apart from the intense human interest of the narra- tive, The Scarlet Letter expresses the sombre side of Puritan life. That was not the only side, for life even then went on its accustomed course. Young lovers kissed each other in the moonlight, as they have always done; and there must have been some frivolity, else why were stich measures taken to repress it? But the most striking, the most picturesque aspect of Puritan life, as we look back on it from laxer times, was its aus- xii INTRODUCTION terity. I suppose those who suffered the most were the children—for there was no place for them in the Puritan régime. \ Their mature masters would doubt- Jess have heartily approved of the following pedagogic recommendations, given out by a German moralist in the eighteenth century. Play must be forbidden in any and all of its forms. The children shall be instructed in this matter in such a way as to show them the wastefulness and folly of all play. They shall be led to see that play will distract their hearts and minds «from God and will work nothing but harm to their spiritual life. The times have changed. Now the entire family revolves around the nursery, where dwells the seat of authority, and the desires of the child are the law of the home. Probably the children are making the most of it, while the good weather lasts. The sombre background of Puritanism brings out the flame of The Scarlet Letter. The colours of the book are a notable part of its scheme. Sunshine and shadow alternate in the great scene by the brook, where for once the accursed letter leaves Hester’s bosom, youth and charm return to her face, only to fade when Pearl refastens the symbol. Pearl herself, the child of passion, flutters across the dark pages of the book, like a brilliant, exotic bird across a sullen sky. For, in that cold community, she is as exotic as a tropical visitor, coming as she does, from a country not only unvisited, but unmentionable, Private sin was followed by public shame. They wore their rue with a difference, but they wore it. In INTRODUCTION xiii the Colony Records of New Playmouth, dated June, 1671, we find (see Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punish- ments of Bygone Days), that the detected ones were forced to wear two Capitall Letters, A.D., cut in cloth and sewed on their uppermost garment on the Arm and Back; and in any time they shall be founde without the letters se worne while in this government they shall be forthwith taken and publickly whipt. Not only is this novel a study of Puritan life exter- nally—the spiritual foundation of the book is Puritan- ism. The consciousness of sin is the core of the tragedy. The four characters are linked indissolubly together by one caprice. A sin by many considered lightly; the source of vulgar jest since the dawn of history; the object of religious worship by some ancient Pagans and by some modern novelists, is here painted in the deepest grain; painted with its inevitable consequences. There are many who rebel fiercely against what they regard as the unfairness of the pun- ishment, for there are many who are trying to play the game of life without obeying the rules. Had the Puritan Jonathan Edwards written the book, instead of the cool artist Hawthorne, he could not have | depicted sin in more powerful language. Thus I could wish that Hawthorne had not added the final chapter, but had let the book close with the dying confession of the minister, and its echo from the crowd. George Woodberry says, It is a relentless tale; the characters are singularly free from self-pity, and accept their fate as righteous; they XIV INTRODUCTION never forgave themselves, they show no sign of having forgiven one another ; even God’s forgiveness is left under a shadow of futurity. .. . A book from which light and love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life; but, in the highest sense, it is a false book. I dislike to differ from such a critic, and from one who adds to his critical perception so sure a sense of moral values. But here he misses the point. To an- swer his main contention, regard Chillingworth, remem- bering that it was often Hawthorne’s way to show an idea negatively. Chillingworth is transformed from a. calm, benign scholar, with the impersonal expression of an investigator, into a fiend; hell has dominion over him, and his eyes glow with the glare of the pit. This degradation is brought about by the subtle poison of re- venge; because he cannot forgive, and be free. His face changes by the slow cancer of hate into something inhuman. Light and love are not absent from the book; over the scaffold there is a celestial glory. And the objection of Mr. Woodberry, that “the characters are singularly free from self-pity,’ is not this one of Hawthorne’s greatest triumphs? Think of the vast number of people to-day, in and out of novels, who insist on their “right to happiness,” no matter by what degradation it is attained, nor by what pain caused to others. Arthur and Hester were made of sterner stuff, as be- ' came the age in which they lived, as became their sense of responsibility, as became their respect for each other’s soul. They were free from the insidious weakness of self-pity. Another leading idea in the book is the contrast be- INTRODUCTION xv tween the loss of public respect and the loss of private respect, self-respect. Hester suffers the worst possible punishment that may befall a woman—public ostracism. There are those who say they do not care what any- body thinks of them; granting that they are speaking truly, a difficult admission, how if such a one were shunned on the streets as if one had some disgusting and contagious disease? How if every public appear- ance meant the derisive hooting by small boys, the studious crossing to the other side by former acquaint- ances, enforced isolation worse than a prison cell? That is what Hester has to endure. But the worst has happened; she at all events has nothing to fear. She suffers more on the street than in the solitude of her own room. There she has peace. Compared with the minister, she is enviable. He is the public idol. What gall, what wormwood, it must be to him to hear his praises sung to his face, to be told by adoring parishioners of the good his sermons have wrought, to be saluted on thé street with all the marks of reverence—and to have the scarlet letter burning in his breast! How intolerable his solitude! Not only is the book a revelation of the powers in the air, but even the bodies of the chief actors express their souls. This has already been pointed out in the case of Chillingworth; consider the varied thoughts of Hester in her varied meetings with Arthur, and how her face changes with them; consider the minister, with his hand on his heart, his body wearing thin from the inner fire till it becomes almost transparent; consider the whimsical fancies of Pearl, and how they are re- flected in her eyes. Such presentations remind us of the words of Donne, speaking of the young girl: Xvi INTRODUCTION Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her body thought. It is instructive by contrast to compare Flaubert’s Madame Bovary with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Both men were equally deliberate artists. In Madame Bovary we have a picture of degeneration ending in despair. Life has no solution. In The Scarlet Letter, we have sin and its consequences, illumined at last by the light of heaven. Flaubert has nothing but scorn for his characters, whereas Hawthorne treats all of his people with dignity. He did not show the sympathy with his characters that we find in Dickens and Thack- eray, but he was deeply moved by their fate. There is another difference between these two masterpieces. Flaubert was interested in the sin itself, and is not sparing of details. Hawthorne is interested only in the mental consequences. Hence he purposely began his story after the crime, in order to concentrate wholly on the spiritual and mental results. It is falling action. The evolution of the story is flawless. The plot un- folds as naturally and with as little apparent effort as the petals of a flower. In this respect, Hawthorne is superior to Balzac; for in the works of the French giant we feel the expense of energy. Here we have a natural beginning, a natural development, with an inexpressibly affecting conclusion. The Scarlet Letter illustrates Hardy’s definition of a novel, that it should be a living organism. Witit1am Lyon PHELPs, New Haven, Conn., December, 1920. THE SCARLET LETTER 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 im- pulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inex- cusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the in- dulgent 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—TI 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 fol- lowed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author ad- dresses, 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 in- dulge themselves in such confidential depths of revela-. R 2 THES GARDE Tpke tion as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as 1f 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 utter- ance 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 conscious- ness, 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 wiil be seen likewise, that this Custom House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recog- nized 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 reiation 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 hap- pened to make one. INTRODUCTORY 3 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 de- cayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symp- toms 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, | say, of this di- lapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass,—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, _ and thence across the harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s government is here es- tablished. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, be- neath which a flight of wide granite steps descends to- wards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enor- mous 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 ap- pears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculencv of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on 4 THES GARRET EEGBET: 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 pre- sume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tender- ness, 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 edi- fice—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 ar- rived at once,—usually from Africa or South America, —or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship- master, just in port, with his vessel’s papers under his arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, ac-, INTRODUCTORY 5 cordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voy- age 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, griz- zly-bearded, care-worn merchant,—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his mas- ters 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 con- tributing an item of no slight importance to our decay- ing trade. Cluster all these individuals together, as they some- times were, with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the Custom House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern—in the entry, if it were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather—a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Often- times they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the oc- cupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but their own independent exertions. 6 THEM GARERT DE TET These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at the re- ceipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were Custom House officers. Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapi- dated 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 cob- webbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tocls 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 be- side 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,— INTRODUCTORY 7 you might have recognized, honored reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Sur- veyor. The besom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity, and pockets his emoluments. This old town of Salem—my native place, though I fave dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and ‘naturer years—possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized, during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, un- varied 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 weari- somely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other,—such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and for- est-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. 8 THE SCARLEDVLEER ERE 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 remem- ber. 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 pro- genitor,—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 re- late 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 INTRODUCTORY 9 a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought. themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties ; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their rep- resentative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as | have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condi- tion of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth retnoved. Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black- browed Puritans would have thought it quite a suffi- cient 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 top- most bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine—if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—-would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?’ murmurs one gray shadow of my fore- fathers to the other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life-—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such are the com- pliments bandied between my great-grandsires and my- self, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have inter- twined themselves with mine. 10 THE SCARLET ERLE R Planted deep, in the town’s earliest infancy and child- hood, by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respecta- bility; 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 al- most out of sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray- headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of four- teen took the hereditary place before the mast, con- fronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blus- tered against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world- wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral cir- cumstances that surround him. It is not love, but in- stinct. 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 con- ception of the oysterlike tenacity with which an old set- tler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the INTRODUCTORY If mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres,— all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost.as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here,—ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main street,— might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an un- healthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native | town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away,—as it seemed, permanently,—but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning, I as- cended 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 12 THES SCARLET ai hy RE. 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 Eng- land’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 heartquake. General Miller was radically conserva- tive; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight Influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a presidential election, they one and all acauired 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 bav. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being INTRODUCTORY. 13 gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom House during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake them- ~ selves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon afterwards—as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their country’s service, as I verily believe it was—withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my inter- ference, a sufficient space was allowed them for re- pentance 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 Sur- veyor was not a politician, and though a faithful Demo- crat 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 with- held 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. 14 PHEVSGARCEVSE LU EE Ts: 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 ad- dressed 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 them- selves 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 incum- bency, {o creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, how- ever, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among them. The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the aew Surveyor had no great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy consciousness of being INTRODUCTORY 15 usefully employed,—in their own behalf, at least, if not for our beloved country,—these good old gentle- men went through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels! Mighty was their fuss about lit- tle matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance occurred,—when a wagon- load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses,—nothing could exceed the vigi- lance 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 praise- worthy caution, after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy. Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion’s character, if it have a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize the man. As most of these old Custom House officers had good traits, arid as my position in reference to them, being paternal and protective, was favorable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant, in the summer forenoons, —when the fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial warmth to their half-torpid systems,—it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them 16 TH FSS Ga RICE Teel ey reals all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozey witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Exter- nally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the. surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood. It would be sad injustice, the reader must under- stand, 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 en- ergy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and de- pendent 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 ma- jority of my corps of veterans, there will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally.as a) set of wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung, away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, to-day’s or to-morrow’s din- ner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, INTRODUCTORY 17 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 Inspec- tor. 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 re- member. This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and cer- tainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter- green that you would be likely to discover in a life- time’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 per- petually reéchoed 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 whole: someness of his system, and his capacity, at that ex« treme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The 18 LHEOS CARL PRU RIghirs careless security of his life in the Custom House, on a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent ap- prehensions 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 in- tellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gen- tleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few common- place instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty chil- dren, 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 nine- teen years, was much the elder and graver man of the two. I used to watch and study this patriarchal person- age 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, INTRODUCTORY 19 such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My con- clusion 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 char acter been put together, that there was no painful per- ception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire con- tentment 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 enjoy- ment 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 recol- lect the good dinners which it had made no small por- tion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gour- mandism 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 en- dowment 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 remi- niscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig of turkey under one’s very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate, that had lingered there not less than 20 TEES OAC ile Terre sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just de- voured 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 mar- vellous 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 appre- ciation and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tender- loin of beef, a hindquarter of veal, a sparerib 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 indi- vidual career, had gone over him with as little perma- nent 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 invet- erately tough that the carving-knife would make no impression on its carcass, and it could only be divided with.an axe and handsaw.. But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, how- ever, 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 pe- culiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office to the end of IND RODUOCTORY 21 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, sub- sequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened with in- firmities 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 se- renity 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 kis 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. 22 THEVSGARE ETM ILE TS outward medium of the intellectual lamp that ob- structed 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 evi- dent effort, his face would briefly subside into its for- ‘mer not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the im- becility of decaying age. The framework of his na- ture, originally strong and massive, was not yet crum- bled into ruin. To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may re- main 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 affec- tion,—for, slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not by a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles to over- come, and an adequate object to be attained, it was INTRODUCTORY 23 not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had tormerly 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 |] speak. But I could imagine, even then, that under some excitement which should go deeply into his con- sciousness,—roused by a trumpet-peal loud enough to awaken all his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering,—he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man’s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment, his demeanor would have still been calm. Such an ex- hibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him— as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga already cited as the most appropriate simile—were the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to ob- stinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unman- ageable 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 philanthro- pists 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 24 THE SCARLET LETTER 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 confi- dently make an appeal. Many characteristics—and those, too, which con- tribute not the least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or been obscured, be- fore I met the General. All merely graceful attri- butes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Na- ture adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall- flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humor, now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruc- tion, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine char- acter 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; un- INTRODUCTORY 25 attainable, 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 un- appropriate 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 be- fore his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and shipmasters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of this commercial and Custom House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their af- fairs did the General appear to sustain the most dis- tant 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 renew- ing 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, —T’ll try, Sir!’’—spoken on the very verge of a des- perate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase— which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken—would be the best and fittest of all mottoes for the General’s shield of arms. , It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and 26 Waihi Ove lie ase) SIRI sc intellectual health, to be brought into habits of com- panionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out_of himself to appreciate. The acci- dents 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, espe- cially, the observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of aman 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 wav- ing of an enchanter’s wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom House, it was his proper field of activ- ity; 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 re- volving 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 lead- ing reference to their fitness for the duty to be per- formed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dex- terity which is not in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity,—which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime,—would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as day- INTRODUCTORY 27 light. 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 con- dition 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 sert- ously 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 liv- ing for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, be- side 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 fas- tidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearth-stone,—it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector 28 THES GARE ET: Hai ky was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lack- ing no essential part of a thorough organization, that, ‘with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change. Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart from me. Nature,—except it were human nature,—the nature that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty if it had not departed, was suspended and in- animate 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 what- ever was valuable in the past. It might be true, in- deed, that this was a life which could not with impu- nity be lived too long; else, it might have made me permanently other than I had been without transform- ing 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 in- stinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come. Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s propor- tion of those qualities) may, at any time, be a man INTRODUCTORY 29 of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but, at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an excellent fellow, who came into office with me and went out only a little later—would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s junior clerk, too,—a young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam’s letter-paper with what (at the distance of a few yards) looked very much like poetry,—used now and then to speak to me of books, 30 DES Ot eH yt ole ras as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities. No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar- boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the im- post, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle cof fame, a knowledge of my exist- ence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will never go again. But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now writing. In the second story of the Custom House there is a large room, in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a =~ INTRODUCTORY 31 recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon an- other, 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 comfortabie livelihood which the clerks of the Custom House had gained by these worthless scratchings oi 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 memo- rials 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 moun- tain 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-estab- ' Jished rank. Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of rec- ords; the earlier documents and archives of the Cus~ 32 REL TOS SC Fe (SET AIT Trin tom House having, probably, been carried off to Hali- fax, 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, per- haps to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to forgotten or remem- bered 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 decipher- able on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such mat- ters 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 chirog- raphy on more substantial materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened an in- stinctive 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 INTRODUCTORY 33 the rigid folds of the parchment cover I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I 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 com- mission 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 ven- erable skull itself. They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at least, written in his private ca- pacity, and apparently with his own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of Cus- tom 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 trans- fer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was left behind and had re- mained ever since unopened. The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I sup- 34 TH EYSCARLE TNE Riiei pose, at that early day, with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted some of his many lei- sure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisition of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would other- wise 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 “Matn STREET,” included in the third volume of this edition. The remainder may per- haps 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 gen- tleman, inclined, and competent, to take the unprofit- able labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I con- template depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the | glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth—for time and wear and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other than a rag,—on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be pre- INTRODUCTORY 35 cisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an orna- mental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scar- let letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind. While thus perplexed,—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to con- trive, in order to take the eyes of Indians,—I hap- pened 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 ex- planation of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who 36 THE SCARLET LETTER appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished dur- ing the period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged per- sons, 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 Scar- LET LETTER”; and it should be borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that storv are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Survevor Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself —a most curious relic,—are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dressine up of the tale. and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the char- acters who fieure in it. T have invariably confined my- self within the limits of the old Survevor’s half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed INTRODUCTORY 37 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 ground- -work of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient Sur- veyor, 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 illumi- nated by a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike, alas! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explana- tory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,—who might reason- ably regard himself as my official ancestor,—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the pub- lic. “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 38 THE SCARLET LETTER will be rightfully due!’ And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, “TI will!’ On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundred-fold repetition, the long extent from the front-door of the Custom House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion—was, to get an appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom House to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my in- tellectual 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 INTRODUCTORY 39 with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. “What have you to do with us?” that expression seemed to say. “The little power you might once have pos- sessed 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. Tt 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 mv sea-shore walks, and rambles into the country, whenever—which was sel- dom and reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used to give me such freshriess and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for in- tellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glim- mering 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. Moon- light, 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 40 LH E SOA Rice) ai dy ers scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sus- taining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extin- guished lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to un- dergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe: the doll, seated in her little wicker car- riage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or plaved 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, with- out 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 moon- shine, 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 influ- ence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirit- uality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it eS a ee ee ! INTRODUCTORY AI 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. Glanc- ing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half- extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picturé, 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 sus- ceptibilities, 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 writ- ing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention. since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesaue force ef his style, and the humorous color- ing 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 42 THE SCARLET LETTER readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap- bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek,. resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I had not fath- omed its deeper import. A better book than 1 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 be- cause my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page. These perceptions have come too late. At the in- stant, | 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, never- INTRODUCTORY 44 theless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom House officer, of long continu- ance, 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 posi- tion—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 weak- ness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of na- | tive 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 strug- gle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this sel- dom 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 foot 44. DET ESS GEIGER iors Tre x path of life as he best may. Conscious of his own in- firmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he forever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervad- ing and continual hope—a hallucination which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impos- sibilities, 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 undertakmg. 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 of- fice 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. Wheever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involv- ing, 1f not his soul, yet many of its better wttributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emiphasis to manly character. Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor brought, the lesson home to himself, or INTRODUCTORY As 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 mel- ancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the ° remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest appre- hension,—as it would never be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it be- ing hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,— it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and be- come much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that Jay before me, finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend,—to make the dinner-hour the nu- cleus 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 Survey: orship—to adopt the tone of “‘P. P.’’—was the elec- tion of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essen- tial, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the iticumbent at the incoming of a hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency. 16 Fie Toa OV UME OTR IEA IRIS ch ce disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly oc- cupy; 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 in- dividuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must need happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the con- _ test, to observe the blood thirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbors—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office holders, were a literal fact instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see occasion; and INTRODUCTORY 47 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 par- tisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adver- sity, 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 cal- culation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retain- ing office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity be- yond 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 suf- ferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. In my particu lar 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 resem- bled 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 Cus- tom House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years; a term long enough to rest a weary brain; AS LIT BOS OA RIVE IRS ee i Jong 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, more- over, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late Survevor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recog- nized hy 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 con- tent 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 posi- tion 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 pub- lic prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving’s Head- less Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought INTRODUCTORY AQ 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 writ- ing-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 satis- factory. Even yet, though my thoughts were ulti- mately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by _ genial sunshine; too 1ittle revealed 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 revo- lution, 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 hap- pier, 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 contrib- ute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines of such antique date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again.* Keeping up the metaphor of the po- litical guillotine, the whole may be considered as the PostHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR; 1At the time of writing this article, the author intended to publish, along with The Scarlet Letter, several shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought advisable to defer. 50 THE SCARLET LETTER 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 forgive- ness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet! The life of the Custom House lies like a dream be- hind me. The old Inspector,—who, by the by, I re- gret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived forever,—he, and all those other venerable person- ages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside forever. The merchants,—Pingree, Phillips,, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,— these, and many other names, which had such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world,—how little time has it required to dis- connect me from them all, not merely in act, but recol- lection! It is with an effort that I recatl 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 cf 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 INTRODUCTORY 5) 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 with- out me. It may he, however,—oh, transporting and trium- phant thought!—that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scrib- bler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days ta come, among the sites memorable in the town’s history, shail point out the locality of THe Town Pump, T THE F RISON-DOOR A tHRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored gar- ments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally pro- ject, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Corn- hill, 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 52 THE PRISON-DOOR 53 World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig- weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which, might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the con- demned 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 over- shadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchinson, as she entered the prison- door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Find. ing it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blos- som, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. if 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 exe- cution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of pub- lic sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puri- tan 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 cor- rected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter- ‘empered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon 54. RUE A RICE) PEACE 55 the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spec- tators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for from such by-standers, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty, which, in our days, would infer a de- gree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punish- ment 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, ap- peared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more deli- cate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of 56 THE SCARLET LETTER 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 shoul- ders 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 pf 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, “T’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 un 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, T trow not?’ “People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Mas- ter Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very griev- ouslv to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his coneregation.” “The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is a truth,” added a third auttimnal matron. “At the very least. they should have put the hrand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that. Pi heM ARISE TPL AGE 57 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 fore- head?” 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 magis- trates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!” “Mercy on us, goodwife,” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips! for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.” The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business _ to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right yon the shoulder of a young 58 THES CARPE TALERR ET 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 char- acter, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison. When the young woman—the mother of this child —stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affec- tion, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. Ina 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 neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fer- tility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in ac- cordance 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 © HE MARKETPLACE 59 hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes: She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; char- acterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was en- veloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,— was that ScarLet LETTER, so fantasti- cally 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, 60 DAES CA Ey OES Dal hae woman, before this brazen huzzy, 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 punish- ment ?”’ “Tt were well,”” muttered the most iron-visage 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, neighbors, peace!’ whispered their youngest companion; “do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart.) The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. “Make way, good people, make way, in the King’s name!’ cried he. “Open a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market- place!” A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious school-boys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in her THE MARKET-PLACE 54% arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison- door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanor was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. Wuth 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 fash- ioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus holding 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,—what- ever be the delinquencies of the individual,—no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face 62 THEY SCARE IIE Iran for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne’s instance, however, as not un- frequently in other cases, her sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but with- out undergoing that gripe about the neck and confine- ment of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish charactéristic 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 Puri- tans, 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 in- fant 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 cor- rupt 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 sen- tence, 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 pres- THE IMARKET-RLACE 63 ent. 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 coun- sellors, 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 concen- trated 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 ob- ject. Hada 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 ~ 64 TARE SGARL EVIL LT iirik 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 mem- ory, 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 what- ever 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 in- stinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the ex- hibition 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 pa- ternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gen- tility. She saw her father’s face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old- fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remon- THE MARKET-PLACE 65 strance 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 coun- tenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory’s picture-gallery, the intri- cate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding it- self 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, fantas- tically 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! | Til 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 na- tive 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 Hes- ter Prynne at such a time; much less would he have ex- cluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companion- ship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange dis- array 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 mani- fest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavored to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed her infant to 66 THE RECOGNITION 67 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 be- fore 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 ex- ternal matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relatien to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips. Then; touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he addressed him, in a formal and courteous manner. “T° pray you, good’ Sir,’ said he,),‘who jis) 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, 68 DEE SGAIR ITS Tera hie and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.” “You say truly,” repiled 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 wilder- ness,” said the townsman, “to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this pur- pose, he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance’”’— “Ah !—aha !—I conceive you,” said the stranger with a bitter smile. ‘So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe— It is some three or four months old, I should judge— which Mistress Prynne is nolding in her arms?” THE RECOGNITION 69 “Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle: and the Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. ‘Madam Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one ‘stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.” “The learned man,” observed the stranger, with an- other smile, “should come himself, to look into the mystery.” “It behooves him well, if he be still in life,” re- sponded the townsman. “Now, good Sir, our Massa- chusetts 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 forcé 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 nat- ural 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 towns- man, and, whispering a few words to his Indian at- tendant, they both made their way through the crowd. 70 PAR WSOARLE TNE Bi iade 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 inter- view, perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot, midday sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth, as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a matronly veil, at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its pro- tection should be withdrawh 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 a — = ee SS Se eee eee THE RECOGNITION 74 guard of honor. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a com- munity, 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 man- hood, 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 institu- tions. 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 virtu- ous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disen- tangling 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 to- wards 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 clergy- man of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his con- temporaries 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 72 THE SCARE Eile isi ian self-congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester’s infant, in the un- / adulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly en- — eraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of those por- traits 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 nat- ural 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 op- poses 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 the 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 J, that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?” 7 a THE RECOGNITION 73 There was a murmur among the dignified and rev- erend occupants of the balcony; and Governor Belling- ham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an au thoritative voice, although tempered with respect to- wards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed. “Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsi- bility of this woman’s soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.” The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest-land. His eloquence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremu- lous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint. Notwithstanding his high na- tive 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. 74 THE SCARE Teh i tit ie 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 trem- ulous. “Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “Tt is of moment to her soul, and therefore, as the wor- shipful 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 accounta- bility under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him—yea, com- pel 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!’ ee ee a ee THE RECOGNITION 75 The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that is 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 in- fluence ; 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 Heav- en'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!” “T will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as 76 PA BuSCARL BIG HIG Ey death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. “And my child must seek a heavenly Father ; she shall never know an earthly one!” “She will not speak!’ murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. “Wondrous - strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!” Discerning the impracticable state of the poor cul- prit’s mind, the elder clergyman, who had carefully pre- pared himself for the occasion, addressed to the multi- tude 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, mean- while, 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 remorse- lessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanor, she was led THE RECOGNITION 77 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 in- terior. WV THE INTERVIEW AFTER her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of nervous excitement that de- manded constant watchfulness lest she should perpe- trate violence on herself, or do some hali-frenzied mis- chief 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 an- guish and despair, which pervaded the mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forci- ble 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 78 THE INTERVIEW 79 convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was an- nounced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, mar- velling at the comparative quiet that followed his en- trance; 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 hereto- Loree “Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,’ an- swered Master Brackett, “I shall own you for a man of skill indeed! Verily, the woman hath been like a pos- sessed 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 char- acteristic quietude of the profession to which he an- nounced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanor change, when the withdrawal of the prison-keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose absorbed no- tice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close.a rela- tion 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. 80 LARS CARD EIEE Bat ink b “My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours,—she is none of mine,—neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father’s. Administer this draught, there- fore, 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 him- self administered the draught. It soon proved its ef- ficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge. The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings grad- ually 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 in- vestigation, proceeded to mingle another draught. “T know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but PEPEUING BITE MA St 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 slumber- ing child. “T have thought of death,” said she,—‘“‘have wished for it,—would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything. Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See! It is even now at my lips.” “Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to let thee live,—than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life,— so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast, as if it had been red-hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of men and women,—in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy husband,—1in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take off this draught.” Without further expostulation or delay, Hester B2 THEVSCARI EAT Chi Tiek 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 ir- reparably 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, hav- - ing 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 younger 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 thy- — self, 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!” . 4 a y u “Thou knowest,” said Hester,—for, depressed as she 4 was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the THE INTERVIEW 83 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 in- nermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!” ‘T have greatly wronged thee,’ murmured Hester. “We have wronged each other,’ answered he. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy bud- ding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?” “Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. ‘That thou shalt never know!” “Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the in- visible 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 84 PAE SOAR PAS R ae els conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy + pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. ‘There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!” The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret there at once. “Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,’ resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!” “Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But thy words interpret thee as a terror!” “One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,” continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept ‘ ia the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine! — There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, ee ee ae ee in, ee - —— ..ore THE INTERVIEW 85 to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me hus- band! 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 mat- ter whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hes- ter Prynne, belong to me. My home ts 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 ?”’ “Tt may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonor that besmirches the husband of a faith- less woman. It may be for other reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware!” “T will keep thy secret, as I have this,’ “Swear it!’ rejoined he. And she took the oath. “And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chil- lingworth, 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, ) said Hester. 86 LL Fe oS © AR EP DET TEE troubled at the expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?” “Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. — “No, not thine!’ . HESTER AT HER NEEDLE HeEsTER PryNnNeE’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 sepa- rate and insulated event, to occur but once in her life- time, 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 con- _demned her—a giant of stern features, but with vigot _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 re- sources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could no | Sr 88 Foes) Ops lia by ad Pvilia EIN a ics longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the | far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap vf shame. Throughout them all, giving up her in- dividuality, 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 hon- orable 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 condemna- tion within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so re- mote and so obscure,—free to return to her birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her char-~ acter 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 assimi- late 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 — HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 89 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, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken. It might be, too,—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole, —it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed her- self connected in a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judg- ment, 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 des- perate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the ~ go PHEVSCARLE TWEET) Tish face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe—what, finally, she rea- soned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a seif-delu- sion. 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 out- skirts 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 re- moteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of hu- man charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing Hes pe nh ra eR ONE EDL g! at the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or com- ing forth along the pathway that led townward; and discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scam- per off with a strange, contagious fear. Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, how- ever, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded compara- tively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art—then, as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp—: of needlework. She bore on her breast, in the curt ously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the Purt- tanic 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 be- hind 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-con- ducted 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 92 THE SCARLET LETTER reins of power; and were readily allowed to individu- als 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 fre- quent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another possi- bility of toil and emolument. By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became ~ what would now be termed the fashion. Whether © from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly re- quited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needlework was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s little cap; it was shut up to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, — in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to em- — broider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever- HESTER ATHERNEEDLE _g3 relentless rigor with which society frowned upon her sin. Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a4 stibsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic descrip- tion, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child, Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet letter.—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say, a fantastic inge- nuity, 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, Hes- ter bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not un- frequently 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 charac: . teristic,—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 exer- cise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incompre- hensible 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. 94 THE SCA RICE il el eas This morbid meddling of conscience with an immate- rial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, some- thing 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 in- tolerable 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 1f she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in con- tact, implied, and often expressed, that she was ban- ished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kin- dred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and hor- rible 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 un- derstood it well, and was in little danger of forget- ting it, was often brought before her vivid self-percep- tion, 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 suc- (BHOS TIETES GUE del olga ay og BB LA a) 95 eor 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 ordi- nary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expres- sion, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; she never re- sponded 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 pa- tient,—a martyr, indeed,—but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of her forgiving aspi- rations, 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. Clergy- men paused in the street to address words of exhorta- tion, 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 her- self the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed fram 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. There fore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a dis- tance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but 96 THE SCARLE DARED RE “was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,— and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into Hester’s soul; so that oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accus- tomed 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 momen- tary 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 soiter 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 Hes- ter,—if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too po- HESTER AT HER NEEDLE Sy tent 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 miser- able 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. Some- times the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable min- ister 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 hu- man within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would con- tumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne’s,— what had the two in common? Qr, once more, the 98 NV es MN DY. 5 HS ty ahd bo BN ERS AS RS EN a electric thrill would give her warning,—‘‘Behold, Hes- ter, 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 al- ways contributing a grotesque horror to what inter- ested 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 Hes- ter’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor 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 immor- tal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty pas- sion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, ag 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 disas- trous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct con- sequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a dlessed 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 99 100 DHE SOARLE TLE Tel iak. faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child’s expand- ing 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 per- fect shape, its vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to nave been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always im- pressed 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 arrange- ment and decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehend- ing 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 BEAREL Ior 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 crim- son 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 4 102 DM ber CARE a Ee rads 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 whole- some regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of ‘her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict control over the infant im- mortality 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 treat- ment 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 cer- tain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be Jlabor thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help ques- tioning, at such moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the a ee — , | PEARL 103 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 re- moteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hover- ing 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 her- self that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly de- lusive. 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 treas- ure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps,—for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her,—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of discontent. Not sel- dom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sor- row. Or—but this more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness; it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity £04 THE SCARLERSLETITER in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the © master-word that should control this new and incom- prehensible 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, delicious — happiness; until—perhaps with that perverse expres- — sion glimmering from beneath her opening lids—tittle Pearl awoke! 3 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 child- ish 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 FRARL | Los themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nur- ture would permit; playing at going to church, per- chance; 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 chil- dren 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, inco- herent exclamations, that made her mother tremble be- cause they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathe- mas 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 unfre- quently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, in- stead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It appalled her, neverthe: less, 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 to- gether in the same circle of seclusion from human so- ciety; and in the nature of the child seemed to be per- petuated those unquiet elements that had distracted 106 LITEM SCAR LE Ena Elon i Hester Prynne before Pearl’s birth, but had since be- gun 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 ac- quaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thou- sand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the puppets, of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby- voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity, —soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human play- mates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile PEARL 107 feelings with which the child regarded all these off- spring 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 ob- serve, 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 ut- terance 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 in- telligence, 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 discus- _sion whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to be- come 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 108 THEY SCARE TER TT Ein the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the let- ter; and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling not doubtfully,.but with a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavoring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the in- telligent touch of Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if her mother’s agonized gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile! From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment’s safety; not a moment’s calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile, and odd expression of the eyes. Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child’s eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and, suddenly,— for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face, in the small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed | the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion. In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after PEARL 10g Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused her- self with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and fling» ing 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, 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 humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney. “Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester. Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a portion of genuine earnest: ness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not ac- quainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself. “Yes; I am little Pearl!’ repeated the child, con tinuing her antics. x10 TESS hie Oar: “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, dn the midst of her deepest suffering. ‘Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither.” “Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, com- ing up to Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!” “Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!’ answered Hes- ter 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 sod’ san= swered the mother, suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into this world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, 1f not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?” “Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer se- @ riously, but laughing, and capering about the floor. “Tt 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 neigh- boring 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 | PEARL III 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. Vit THE GOVERNOR’S HALL HeEsTER PRYNNE went, one day, to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a pair of gloves, which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an honorable and influ- ential place among the colonial magistracy. Another and far more important reason than the de~- livery 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 settle< ment. It had reached her ears, that there was a de-~ sign on the part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in re- ligion 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 1i2 THE GOVERNOR’S HALL 113 than Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and indeed not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town, should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight, than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legisla- tors and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute con- cerning 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 tine 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 cot- tage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion, from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be set down again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tum- ble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant § I14 THEN SOAR EY Bd ea 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 passion- ate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her im- agination their full play; arraying her in a crimson vel- vet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread. So much strength of coloring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth. But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child’s whole appearance, that it irresist- ibly 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 ste one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to rep- resent 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 RHE (GOVERNORS HALL IIs their play—or what passed for play with those som- bre little urchins,—and spake gravely one to another :— “Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!’ But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frown- ing, 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 ta 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 fu- gitives to quake within them. The victory accom- plished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up, smiling, into her face. Without further adventure, they reached the dwell- ing of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are speci- mens 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, mto which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a all 116 “THE SCARLET LETTER kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sun- shine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin’s palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the ad- iration of after times. Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, be- gan 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) mothers#) 5 non must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give theed: They approached the door; which was of an arched form, and flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were lattice- windows, with wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the por- tal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was an- swered by one of the Governor’s bond-servants; a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave. During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men of that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL 117 “Ts the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?” inquired Hester. “Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, ont with wide-open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before seen. “Yea, his honorable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise 4 leech. Ye may not see his worship now.” “Nevertheless, I will enter,’ replied Hester Prynne, and the bond-servant, perhavs, judging from the de- cision 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, sug: gested by the nature of his building-materials, diver- sity 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 communica- tion, more or less directly, with all the other apart- ments. 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 em- bowed 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 substan- tial literature; even_as, in our own days, we scatte? 118 THES OCARL EIN dB ei gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall con- sisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flow- ers; 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 pa- ternal home. » On the table—in token that the senti- ment of old English hospitality had not been left be- hind—stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale. On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armor on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterized by the sternnéss and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pic- tures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and en- joyments 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 ar- morer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel headpiece, 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 THE GOVERNOR’S HALL 119 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, more- over, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier as well as a statesman and ruler. Little Pearl—who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armor as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house—spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate. wiViother) “cried she; \ l’see you here, “ook! ook; “lester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this con- vex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exag- gerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upward, also, at a similar picture in the head- piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelli- gence 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 Rear ysesnape sti’ “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.” 9 120 CA EV SCAR ERI Nee Jie re Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with closely shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some dis- tance, had run across the intervening space, and de- posited 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 num- ber of persons were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent; not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of these new personages. VITl THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER GOVERNOR BELLINGHAM, in a loose gown and easy cap,—such as elderly gentlemen loved to endue them. selves with, in their domestic privacy,—walked fore- most, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enitoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose that our grave forefathers —though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty—made it a matter of con- science to reject such means of comfort, or even lux- ury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham’s shoulder; while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalized in the New England climate, and that pur- | 121 122 RES SCARLET PLEAD ike ple 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 pro- fessional 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 min- ister, whose health had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labors and du- ties of the pastoral relation. The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall-window, found himself close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed her. “What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen the like, since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favor to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a swarm of these small WE EEE DAN DOG EXAM INIS TER its apparitions, in holiday time; and we called them chil- dren of the Lord of Misrule. But how got such a guest into my hall?’ “Ay, indeed!” cried good old Mr. Wilson. ‘What little bird of scarlet plumage may this be? Methinks IT 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 bedi- zen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Chris- tian 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?” “T 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 at- tempt 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 to- gether; 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. 124 THE SCARLET LETTER “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 weil 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?” ~“T can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!’ answered Hester Prynne, laying her fin- ger 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 erowing 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 bet- ter, 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, THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER — 128 and made an effort to draw Pearl betwixt his knees, But the child, unaccustomed to the touch of familiar- ity 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 grand. fatherly sort of personage, and usually a vast favorite with children,—essayed, however, to proceed with the examination. “Pearl,” said he, with great solemnity, “thou must take heed to instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?” Now Pearl knew well enough who made her; for Hester Prynne, the daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so large were the attainments of her three years’ lifetime, could have borne a fair examination in the New Eng- land 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 pos- session 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 questions, the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked 126 HE SCARLET LENT ER ie by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door. This fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in com- ing 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 star- tled to perceive what a change had come over his fea- tures,—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 in- stant, but was immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now going forward. “This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recov- ering from the astonishment into which Pearl’s re- sponse had thrown him. “Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! With- out 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 PH BUP-CoUD AND PAE MINISTER) 129 in requital of all things else, which he 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 ca- pable of being loved, and so endowed with a million- fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!” “My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minis- ter, ‘‘the child shall be well cared for !—far better than thou canst do it.” “God gave her into my keeping,’ repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice almost to a shriek. “I will not give her up!’’—And here, by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes.—“Speak thou for me!” cried she. “Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for met 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 nerv- ous temperament was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene of Hester’s public ignos 128 THE SCARLET ALE TAT miny; and whether it were his failing health, or what- ever 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 minis- ter, with a voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, Inso- much that the hall reechoed, and the hollow armor rang with it,—“truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements,—both seemingly so _ peculiar,— which no other mortal being can possess. And, more- over, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child?” “Ay!—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?” in- terrupted the Governor. “Make that plain, I pray you!” “It must be even so,’’ resumed the minister. “For, if we deem it otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the Creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognized a deed of sin, and made of no ac- count the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy lover ‘This child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame hath come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her. It was meant for a blessing, for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, as the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a trou- bled 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?” b) THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 129 “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 sol——not so!” continued Mr. Dimmes- dale. “She recognizes, believe me, the solemn mira- cle 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 sor- row, confided to her care,—to be trained up by her to righteousness,—to remind her, at every moment, of her fall,—but yet to teach her, as it were by the Creator’s sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parent thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s sake, then, and no less for the poor child’s sake, let us leave them as Provi- dence hath seen fit to place them!” “You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him. “And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,’ added the Reverend Mr. Wil- son. “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 130 LT ENS COA Te Be ESE 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 with- drawn a few steps from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy folds of the win- dow-curtains; 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 unob- trusive, 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 life- time 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 child- ish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply in us some- thing 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 un- wonted 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 pro- fess,’ said he to Mr. Dimmesdale. ‘She needs no old woman’s broomstick to fly withal!” “A strange child!” remarked old Roger Chilling- HEEL P-GP DAN DitiHtEy MINTS LHR 13k worth. “It is easy to see the mother’s part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher’s research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyze that child’s nature, and, from its make and mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?” “Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to fol- low the clew of profane philosophy,” said Mr. Wilson. “Better to fast and pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of -its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a father’s kindness towards the poor, deserted babe.” The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hubbins, 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 phys- iognomy seemed to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. “Wilt thou go with us to- night? ‘There will be a merry company in the forest; and I wellnigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.” “Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with a triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too, and that with mine own blood!” “We shall have thee there anon!” said the witch- lady, frowning, as she drew back her head. ¥32 THE SCARLET LETTER 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 rela- tion 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 Unoper 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 cheerful- ness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her matronly frame 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 dis- honor,—which would not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion with the intimacy and sa- credness of their previous relationship. Then why— since the choice was with himself—should the indt- vidual, whose connection with the fallen woman had been the most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so lit- tle 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 133 134 THES @ARLE ET (isiadiy) ire mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and inter- ests, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumor had long ago consigned him. This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the'full strength of his faculties. In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his resi- dence in the Puritan town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and in- telligence 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 re- ceived. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guar- dianship of an aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his favor than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To THE LEECH 135 stich a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his famil- iarity 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 prop- erties of native herbs and roots; nor did he concea! from his patients, that these simple medicines, Na- ture’s boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European phar- macopceia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating. This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded, at least, the outward forms of a religious life, and, early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little less than a heaven-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labor for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds for the now feeble New England Church as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young minister’s cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clog- ging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, 136 DAES SOAR Ih Ee ice te 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. e 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 value- less to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby, and other famous men,—whose scien- tific attainments were esteemed hardly less than super- natural,—as having been his correspondents or asso- ciates. 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 THE LEECH 137 answer to this query, a rumor gained ground,—and, however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible yeople,—that Heaven had wrought an absolute mira- cle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic, from a German university, bodily through the air, and set- ting 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-effeet of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in Roger Chil- lingworth’s so opportune arrival. This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever manifested in the young clergy- man; 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 anx- ious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favorable result. The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens, of Mr. Dimmesdale’s flock, were alike importunate that he should make trial of the physician’s frankly offered skill, Mr. Dimmesdale gently repelled their entreaties. “T need no medicine,” said he. But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than before, —when it had. now become a constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his labors?» Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston and the 138 DAES GARE Tuer Ey eres 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 si- lence, and finally promised to confer with the physi- cian. “Were it God’s will,” said the Reverend Mr. Dim- mesdale, when, in fulfilment of this pledge, he re- quested old Roger Chillingworth’s professional advice, “T could be well content that my labors, and my sor- rows, 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 ‘ee quiet- ness which, whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, “it 1s thus that a young clergyman 1s 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 push 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 Chilling- worth 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, aoe EOEe 139 so different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the minister’s health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the guest of the other, in his place of study and retire- ment. There was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he recog- nized 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 mem- bers 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 Gavsionnal 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 i: confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamplight, or ob- structed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the r 140 LL TOES Gee PT aan { air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew again within the limits of what their church defined as orthodox. Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagina- tion were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its ground- work there. So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician—strove to goa deep into his patient’s bosom, delving among his prin- ciples, prying into his recollections, and probing every- thing with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,—let us call it intui- tion; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient’s, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himsel{ THE, LEECH I4t 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. un- derstood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized char- acter as a physician,—then, at some inevitable mo- ment, 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 enti rated) Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said, grew up be- tween 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 char- acter; 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 ior Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrange. ment 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 142 Vik SCARLETS ER TER ys clergyman’s welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he re- jected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at another’s board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who. seeks to warm himself only at another’s fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man of all mankind to be constantly within reach of his voice. The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social rank, who dwelt in a house cov- pring 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 well adapted to call up seri- ous 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, ‘epresenting the Scriptural story of David and Bath- heba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, out which made the fair woman of the scene almost THEO LEECH 143 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 them- selves. 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 appa- ratus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemi- cals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situa- tion, 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 dis- cerning 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 do- mestic, and secret prayers—of restoring the young min- ister 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 judg- ment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice 144 TREES GUE TE Dae ore against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged handi- craftsman, 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 Doc- tor Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was im- plicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or three in- dividuals 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 en- chanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the black art. A large number—and many of these were persons of such sober sense and practical observation that their opinions would have been valuable in other matters—affirmed that Roger Chillingworth’s aspect had undergone a_ remarkable change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like. Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke. To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion, that the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of especial sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan NeGe, CileloOses 145 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 clergy- man’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 un- shaken hope, to see the minister come forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he would un- questionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph. Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depths of the poor minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory anything but secure. Xx THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT Oxp Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm affec- tions, but ever, and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investiga- tion, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the ques- tion involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human pas- . sions, 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 hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim’s face. The soil where this dark miner was working had per- chance shown indications that encouraged him. 146 DU ibis Orne oy PE LS ee ee ND ae bd “This man,” said he, at one such moment, to him- self, “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 direc- tion of this vien!”’ Then, after long search into the minister’s dim in- terior, 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 illumi- nated 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, if 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 for- bidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him. But old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but never intrusive friend. Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual’s character more perfectly, if a certain mor- bidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not rendered a» 148 THE SOAR TVG Tri, him suspicious of all mankind. Trasting 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 labAratone and, for recreation’s sake, siyatals the processes by which weeds were converted into draes of potency. One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked to- wards the graveyard, he talked with Roger Chilling- worth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants. “Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them,— for it was the clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, nowadays, looked straightforth at any object, whether human or inanimate,—“where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark flabby leaf?” “Even in the graveyard here at hand,”’ answered the physician continuing his employment. ‘They are new tome. I found them growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, nor other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime.” “Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly de- sired it, but could not.” “And wherefore?” rejoined the physician. ‘‘Where- fore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime?” THE LEECH\AND: HIS PATIEN PF tAg b) “That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours,” replied the minister. “There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be re- vealed. 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 ofall intelligent beings, who will -tand 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 mis- erable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at ‘that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy un- utterable.”’ “Then why not reveal them here?’ asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing quietly aside at the minister. “Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail them- selves 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, bit 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 long stifling with his ow pol- X50 LITE NMSOARL EL Ten yiiesye luted 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 ‘ realm physician. ‘True; there are such men,” answered Mr. Dimmes- dale. “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 Chilling- worth, 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 aellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify (sod, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! lf 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! DEL TOL OAT G AUN DELL Sy REE Nip od Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better—can be more for God’s glory, or man’s welfare—than God’s own truth? Trust me, such men deceive themselves!’’ “It may be so,” said the young clergyman, indiffer- ently, as waiving a discussion that he considered irrel- evant or unreasonable. He had a ready faculty, in- deed, 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 sum- mer-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 con- tact. 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 be- side 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 152 THE SCARLET LETTER 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,” re- marked he, as much to himself as to his companion. “T saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor him- self 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,” an- swered 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, look- ing up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands in the most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked up; and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till the child laughed aloud; and shouted,—“‘Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!’ So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically, among the hillocks of the dead JURE BE Oi AN ELS) sein he Nite tie 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 Chilling- worth, 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?” “T do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman. “Nevertheless I cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.”’ There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine and arrange the plants which he had gathered. “You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he, at length, “my judgment as touching your health.” “T 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 mutch 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 “ir, and d 154 THE SCARLET BERET 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 phy- sician, “and I crave pardon, Sir,—should it seem tc require pardon,—for this needful plainness of my speech. Let me ask,—as your friend,—as one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well-being,—hath all the operation of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted to me?” “How can you question it?’ asked the minister. “Surely, it were child’s play to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!’ “You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated intelligence, on the munister’s face. “Be 1t so!\' But, again? beste 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, 4HE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 155 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 flerceness, 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. “Tt 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 him- self! As with one passion, so with another! He hath: done a wild thing erenow, this pious Master Dimmes- dale, in the hot passion of his heart!” It proved not difficult to reéstablish the intimacy of 356 THE SCARLET VEER Tc 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 out- break 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 apolo- gies, 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 super- vision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient’s apart- ment, at the close of a professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon his lips. This ex- pression 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 re- corded, that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noon- day, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slum- ber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume epen before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of litera- RAL EOP AND ATS Pa TPN | ieee? ture. The profound depth of the minister’s repose waa 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 hor- ror! 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 ugli- ness 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 ex- ternally the same, was really of another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chil- lingworth 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 unfor- tunate old man, which led him to imagine a more inti- mate 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 noth- ing 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, per- r58 THE INTERIOR OF A HEART 159 chance, 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 mat- tered little, for his object, whether celestial, or from what other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul, of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine; and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician’s wand, uprose a grisly phan- tom,—uprose a thousand phantoms,—in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at hig breast ! All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect that the minister, though he had constantly a dim per- ception 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 tq acknowledge to himself. For, 160 TUES OAC Ae alias as it was impossible to assign a reason for such dis- trust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s entire substance, attributed all his presenti- ments to no other cause. He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chilling- worth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Un- able 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 oppor- tunities 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 enawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were. There were scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a THE INTERIOR: OF: A. HEART 161 far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron, or granite un- derstanding; which, duly mingled with a fair propor- tion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly re- spectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealized, moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flames; symbol- izing, 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 lan- guage. 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 fa- miliar 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 char- acter, 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 an- 162 TEV SCARY Bish hie ke swered! 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 pas- sion so imbued with religious sentiment that they im- agined 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, be- lieved 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 substancer—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his THE INTERIOR OF ‘A HEART 163 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 foot- steps, 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 pas- tor, 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 alto- gether 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 im- pulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit, which he 164 PES OAT ET yi Ai eae 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 avowa! 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 io 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 piti- lessly 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 trem- bled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, ‘ikewise, night after night, sometimes in utter dark THR INTERIOR OR A-HEART 165 ness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and some- times, 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 dia- bolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale min- ister, 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, turn- ing 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 na- ture, like yonder table of carved oak, «+: that big, square, leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery 166 REEVSOARLE Rina EE hy, of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and sub- stance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. Yo the untrue man, the whole uni- verse is false,—it is impalpable,—it shrinks to noth- ing 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 undissem- bled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gayety, there would have been no such man! On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s peace in it. Attir- ing 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 bal- cony of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps. It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from, zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the 167 168 DNL EOS Ca ee ee Gage bors 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 1ron-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 con- tinually 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, ind 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 reverber- ated from the hills in the background; as 1f a company THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 164 of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were ban ovans it to and fro. “Tt 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, uncov- ered his eyes and looked abott 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 nightcap 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 an- other 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 expres- sion 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 vener- able witch-lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night- 170 THE SCARLET LETTER hags, with whom she was well known to make excur- sions into the forest. Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady quickly extinguished her own, and van- ished. 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 fur- ther than he might into a mill-stone,—retired from the window. The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon greeted by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off, was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here a post, and there a garden-fence, and here a latticed window- pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here, again, an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the doorstep. The Rev- erend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particu- Jars, 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 be- held, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergy- man,—or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly valued friend,—the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. And now, surrounded, like the saint-like personages of TEE MINISTERS VIGEL 171 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 triumphal 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. Dimmes- dale, who smiled,—nay, almost laughed at him,—and then wondered if he were going mad. As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaf- fold, 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 con- | tinued 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 in- voluntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness. Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the hu- et 2 DELESS Gai relies feel ie | morous again stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should-be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him there. The neighborhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost—as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then —the morning light still waxing stronger—old patri- archs 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 per- sonages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James’s ruff fastened askew ; and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale’s church, and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 173 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 Dimmes- dale, 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 immedi- ately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart,—but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute,—he recognized the tones of little Pearl. } Pearl !>) Eittle’ Pearl!” cried he after a momentis 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 ap- proaching from the sidewalk, along which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.” “Whence. come you, Hester!’ asked the minister. “What sent you hither?” “T 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 ew 174 THE SCARLET LETTER platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The min- ister 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- terpid system. The three formed an electric chain. “Minister !’ whispered little Pearl. “What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmes- Peaale: “Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to- morrow noontide?”’ inquired Pearl. “Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the min- ister; 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 him- self. “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 min- ister,—and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled him to an- swer the child so. ‘Then, and there, before the judg- THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 175 ment-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 illumi- nated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass spring- ing 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 embroid- ered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another. There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her 176 RHE SCARE ER EVEie rs face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elfish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmes- dale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes to- wards 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. Pesti- lence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distort- ing medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his afterthought. It was, indeed, a majes- tic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a reve- dation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast THE MINISTER'S, VIGIL 177 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, in- tense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate! We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it. There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Ditmmesdale’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 point- ing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The min- ister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new ex- pression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malev olence with which he looked upon his victim. Cer tainly, 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 iw 178 THE SCARLET LETLER 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. Dimmes- dale, overcome with terror. “I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!’ She remembered her oath, and was silent. “T tell thee, my soul shivers at him!’ muttered the minister again. “Whois he? Whois 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 gib- berish 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 Chilling- worth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergy- man, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind. The elfish child then laughed aloud. “Dost thou mock me now?” said the minister. “Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!”—an- swered the child. “Thou wouldst not promise to take my nand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow noontide!’ “Worthy Sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform. ‘Pious Master Dimmesdale, can this be you? Well, well, indeed! We THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 179 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 min- ister, fearfully. “Verily, and in good faith,” answered Roger Chil- lingworth, “I knew nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the bedside of the wor- shipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to give him ease. He going home to a better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this strange light shone out. Come with me, I be- seech 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 pas- time; or these night whimseys will grow upon you.” “T will go home with you,” said Mr. Dimmesdale. With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerve- less, from an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away. Whe 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 them- selves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmes- — dale throughout the long hereafter. But, as he came down the pulpit steps, the gray-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his own. 180 DLE S CR ie Tia agit “Tt 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.” XII 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 help- less on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps ac- quired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train of cir- cumstances 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, more- over, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little ac- customed, in her long seclusion from society, to meas- ure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of human kind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, 181 182 THE SOARD BY SR iiate 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 ear- lier 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 com- munity, and, at the same time, interferes neither with public nor individual interests and conveniences, a spe- cies of general regard had ultimately grown up in ref- erence 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 irri- tation nor irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but submitted, uncomplainingly, to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it, in requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she had been set apart to infamy, was reckoned largely in her favor. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor wanderer to its paths. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 183 It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world’s privileges,—further than to breathe the common air, and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labor of her hands,—she was quick to ac- knowledge her sisterhood with the race of man, when- ever 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 inter- course with her fellow-creatures. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer’s hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot,‘ while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies, Hes- ter’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 184 BV SCARLET (CE Ia iis had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the sym- bol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize, —that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength, It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up the. meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zeal- ously. Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were reso- lute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet let- ter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influ- ence of the latter quality on the public mind. The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of deny- ing 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 na- ture, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, than she deserved. The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging the influ- ence of Hester’s good qualities than the people. The ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 185 prejudices which they shared in common with the lat- ter were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labor to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since. “Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?’ they would say to strangers. “It is our Hester,—the town’s own Hester, who is so kind to the poor, so help- ful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!” Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it, but fell harmless to the ground. The effect of the symbol—or, rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by it—on the 186 HAE SCARLET in iiks, 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 pos- sessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a simi- Jar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and partly to the lack of demon- stration in her manners. It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either, been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be no longer any- thing in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 187 We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever after- wards so touched, and so transfigured. Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impres- sion was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,— alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancinated, 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 prin- ciple. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She as- sumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our fore- fathers, had they known it, would have held to bea deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, _ thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door. It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude 188 Fee Bm oy OU ces ed aad AS Bd od BTR ad x 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 spirit- ual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Anne 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 pas- sion,—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 ex- istence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to specula- tion, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 189 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 evapo- rated. 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 upper- most, they vanish. Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered with- out a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind: now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort no- where. 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 oi 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 Igo THE SCARLEINDE PPE 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 en- emy had been continually by his side, under the sem- blance 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. Hes- ter 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 justifi- cation 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 in- adequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin, and half maddened by the igno- miny, 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 per- haps 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 © ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER IQI 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 con- coct his medicines witha] XTV\ 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 gieam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water. Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. “T 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 192 HESRER AND: TH E- PHYSICIAN, 193 heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magis- trate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the common weal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forth- with!” “It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge,” calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport.” “Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,’’ rejoined he. “A woman must needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her person. The letter is gayly embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!” All this while, Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was shocked, as well as wonder- smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible, he wore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigor and alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been succeedea by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose 194 THE SCARLET LETTER to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter played him false, and flickered over his visage so de- risively, 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 pas- sion, 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 developing himself, for seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and add- ing fuel to those fiery tortures which he analyzed and gloated over. The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her. “What see you in my face,’ asked the physician, “that you look at it so earnestly ?” “Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough for it,’ answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable man that I would _ speak.” “And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only person of whom he could make a confidant. ‘‘Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be WES RAN DOTA PHY STOLAN | oro 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 prom: ise of secrecy, as touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yon- der man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent, in accordance with your be- hest. 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 be- hind 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 l1fe, 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 Chilling- worth. “My finger, pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon,—thence, peradventure, to the gallows!’ “Tt had been better so!” said Hester Prynne. “What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again. “TI 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 106 THE SCARLET LETTER 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 dwell- ing always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence !—the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!—and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed !—he did not err!—there was a fiend at his el- bow! 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 HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN 107 had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now. “Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old man’s look. ‘Has he not paid thee all P”’ “No!—no! He has but increased the debt!’ an- swered 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 ad- vancement 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, never- theless 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 lam! A fiend! Who made me so?” “It was myself!” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was 198 TORT ER SCAT ICE Tie hy Tubal I, not less than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself pn me?” “T have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth. “If that have not avenged me, I can (lo no more!” He laid his finger on it, with a smile. “It has avenged thee!’ answered Hester Prynne. “T judged no less,” said the physician. “And now, what wouldst thou with me touching this man?” “T must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I,—whom the scarlet letter has disci- plined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron, entering into the soul—nor do I perceive such ad- vantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly empti- ness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him,—no good for me,—no good for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!” “Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!” said Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great ele- ments. 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 HESTER ANDTHE PHYSICIAN ‘199 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 mo- ment, 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 ta his employment of gathering herbs. XV HESTER AND PEARL So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic curi- osity 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 de- formity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly 200 HESTER AND PEARL 201 sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven? “Be it sin or no,’ said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as she still gazed after him, “I hate the man!” She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days, in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study, and sit down in the 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 bet- ter, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side. “Ves, I hate him!’ repeated Hester, more bitterly Woe THE SCARLET LETTER than before. ‘He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!” Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance ? The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chilling- worth, threw a dark light on Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have ac- knowledged to herself. He being gone, she summoned back her child. V Pearl) Little: Pearl! {/W here are yous Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and— as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in HOR AND EARL 203 New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it, with winged footsteps, to catch the great snow-flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds, that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed re- markable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself. Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for devis- ing drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and* imi. tated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decora- tion 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. “T wonder if mother will ask me what it means!” thought Pearl. 204. DEVS GARE EI WER Tier: 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 eater a “Yes, mother,” said the child., “Its the greatfletter 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 smil- ing at the absurd incongruity of the child’s observa- tion; 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 yon- der 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?” HESTER AND PEARL 205 She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen it) her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester that the child might really be seek- ing to approach her with childlike confidence, and do- ing 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 pettlant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misde- meanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker coloring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could be made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother’s sorrows as could be im- parted, 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 unflinch- ing courage,—an uncontrollable will,—a sturdy pride, 206 TEES CARRIE IArE which might be disciplined into self-respect,—and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavors of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child. : Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious Iife, 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 de- sign, 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. HESTER AND PEARL 207 “What does the letter mean, mother ?—and why dost thou wear it?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?” “What shall I say?’ thought Hester to herself. “No! If this be the price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.” Then she spoke aloud. “Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold-thread.” In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit,;who now forsook her; as recognizing that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the ear- nestness 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 home- ward, 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 gleam. ing in her black eyes. “Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?” And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other inquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter,— 208 THEVSOARLE TALE Rise ke “Mother !—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart ?”’ “Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease me, else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!” XVI A FOREST WALK HeEsTER PrRYNNE remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true char- acter of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however, she vainly sought an oppor- tunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the habit of taking, along the shores of the peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighboring country. There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman’s good faine, 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 be- tokened by the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imputed suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would need the whole wide‘world to breathe in, while they talked together,—{for all these reasons, Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky. At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned to 209 210 THEVSCARLET VA TEER 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. SBetimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl,—who was neces- sarily 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 Hes- ter’s mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long vista through the forest. The sportive sun- light—feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pen- siveness 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 vou. 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. JT 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 A POOREST! WALK Dey - 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.” Peari 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 splen- dor, 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. “Tt will go now,” said Pearl, shaking her head. “See!” answered Hester, smiling. “‘Now I can stretch out my hand, and grasp some of it.’ As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl’s features, her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade. There was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigor in Pearl’s nature, as this never-failing vivacity of spirits; she had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this too was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl’s birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child’s character. She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of 212 PH BOSC Pel eT sympathy. But there was time enough yet for litttle - Pearl. “Come, my child!” said Hester, looking about her | from the spot where Pearl had stood still in the sun- shine. ‘We will sit down a little way within the wood, and rest ourselves.” “T 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, recognizing a common superstition of the period. “Tt 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 Mis- tress 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 A FOREST WALK 213 true, mother? And dost thou go to meet him in the night-time ?”’ “Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother gone?”’ asked Hester. “Not that I remember,” said the child. “If thou fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?” “Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?” asked her mother. “Ves, 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 ereat 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 pas- sages, there appeared a channelway 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 bewilder- 214 THES OAR LE Tees Tee ment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here ana there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and bowlders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest ‘ whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole on- ward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, sooth- ing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue. “O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!” cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. ‘Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!” But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course, “What does this sad little brook say, mother?” in- quired she. “Tf 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 foot- step along the path, and the noise of one putting aside Ay PORES T WALDK. ie aL the branches. J would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes yonder.” “Ts 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 minis- ter wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it out side 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 cur- rent of the brook, and striving to mingle a more light- some 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, ang 216 THT EP SCART Lowder: 2h rs some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock. When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the path, entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the wayside. He looked haggard ands feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situa- tion where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was woefully visible, in the intense seclusion of the forest, which, of itself, would have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no reason for taking one step farther, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie tere 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 ex- hibited no symptom of positive and vivacious suffer- ing, 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 path- way 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 vears past! And thou, Arthur Dim- mesdale, dost thou yet live?” It was no wonder that they thus questioned one an- 217 518 THE SCARLET LETTER other’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 inti- mately 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 his- tory 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 ne- cessity, 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 them- selves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere. Without a word more spoken,—neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but with an unexpressed con- sent,—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 afid inquiries such as any two ac- Juaintances: 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, h i ; ; . 4 P f THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 219 and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold. After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne’s. “Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?” She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom. “Hast thou?” she asked. “None !—nothing but despair!’ he answered. “What else could I look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist,—a man ce- void 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 tor- ment. 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 con- cerns 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 puri- fication? 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 lis- tening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were 220 TEV Cae) hier speaking !—and then look inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolize? I have laughed, in bitter- ness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what lam! 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 holi- ness, 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 re- lief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy !—to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But, now, it is all falsehood !—all emptiness! —all death!” Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what THE PASTOR/SAND HIS PARISHIONER | 225, 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. “Tat What ‘sayest thou!” cried he. .“An enemy! And under mine own roof! What mean you?” Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had: been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,—the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,—and his authorized interference, as a physician, with the minister’s physical and spiritual infirmities,—that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. poi THESSCARLET BARE E 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 of itr— still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacri- fice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died, there, at Arthur Dimmesdale’s feet. “O Arthur,” cried she, “forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have’held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good,—thy life, —thy fame,—were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!the physician !— he whom they call Roger Chillingworth !—he was my husband !” The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of passion, which—intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher, purer, softer quali- ties—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 TARSPASRORVAN Dini S4RARISTHLONE R223 Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his charac- ter had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were incapable of more than a tem- porary struggle. He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands. “T 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? Why did I not understand? O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame !—the indelicacy ! —the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!’ “Thou shalt forgive me!” cried Hester, flinging her- self 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 224 THE SCARLET LETTER over again. “Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou for- give?” , _ “T do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister, at length, with a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sad- ness, 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 en- closed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were | tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come. And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the for- est-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 LE PASTEORGAND- AHISVPARISHIONER | 22% 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 Dimmes- dale, 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 ne longer under his evil eye!” “Tt 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, b) 226 DHE SGARLET TBI ie 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 con- acience-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.” “Ts the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the minister’s, and in- stinctively 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 vellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man’s tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would coring 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!” re- plied the minister, with a sad smile. “Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!” con- tinued 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 Lon- flon,—or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Witt Aol One Sct ARIS) ON Re 237 Italy—thou wouldst be beyond his power and knowl. edge! And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already!” “It cannot be!’ answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to realize a dream. “I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinfui as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly ex- istence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an end!” “Thou art crushed under this seven years’ weight of misery,” replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. “But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, ag thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, 1f 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 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 cansé 228 BOB SG ah Rds Pd rene wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!—that have made thee feeble to will and to do /—that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!” “O Hester!’ cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, “‘thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone!” Tt was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach. He repeated the word. “Alone, Hester!” “Thou shalt not go alone!’ answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was spoken! XVITI 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 in- tricate 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 looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legisla- tors have established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fire- - side, or the church. The tendency of her fate and for- tunes 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 229 230 THEXSCARLET LETTER 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. Asa 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 pain- fully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than 1f 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 extenu- ation of his crime? None; unless it avail him some- what, 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 hypo- crite, conscience might find it hard to strike the bal- ance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; | A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 231 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 ave- nue, in preference to that where he had formerly suc- ceeded. 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 it were one, need not be described. Let it suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone. Pi terin ail these past seven years, thought hewat 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,—where- fore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the con- demned 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 anv longer live without her companion-_ ship; so powerful is she to sustain,—so tender to soothe! O Thou to whom IJ dare not lift mire 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 enjoy- ment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of 232 FHIO SCARLET LELPER his breast. It was the exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood. “Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at him- self. “Methought the germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened —down upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?” “Let us not look back,’ answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make’ it as it had never been!” So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand’s-breadth farther flight it would have fallen into the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But there lay the em- broidered 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. ‘A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 233 The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. Oh, exquisite relief! She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By an- other impulse, she took off the formal cap that con- fined 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 crim- son 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 ir- revocable 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 hu- man 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 234 DEES Cr Palys Heide 1 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 Hes- ter’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s! Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy. “Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen her,—yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her.” , “Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?” asked the minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children, because they often show a dis- trust,—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 ofa: ewallvcall “her ie Pearl Pearls “T see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So thou thinkest the child will love me?” Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct,—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit, -—as the splendor went and came again. She heard her mother’s voice, and approached slowly through the forest. Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 235 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 au- tumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment,—for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to dis- tinguish 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 Jeaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable——came up, and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child. 236 PAPE SOAR EASE she Ie And she was gentler here than in the grassy-mar- gined streets of the settlement, or in her mother’s cot- tage. The flowers appeared to know it; and one and another whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!’— and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly back. Slowly; for she saw the clergyman. XIX THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE “THou wilt love her dearly,’ repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flow- ers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and dia- monds, 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 Dimmes- dale, with an unquiet smile, ‘“‘that this dear child, trip- ping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought—O Hester, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!—that my own fea- tures were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!” “No, no! Not mostly!’ answered the mother, with a tender smile. “A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild-flowers in her hair! It is.as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet 11S 4 1? It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced that they sat and watched Pearl’s 237 238 THE SCARLET LETTER slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was re- vealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—all written in this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once the material _ union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together? Thoughts like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define—threw an awe about the child as she came onward. “Let her see nothing strange—no passion nor eager- ness—in thy way of accosting her,’ whispered Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf, some- times. Especially she is seldom tolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!” “Thou canst not think,” said the minister, glancing aside at Hester Prynne, “how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time,—thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor.” THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 239 “And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!’ answered the mother. “I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!” By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood an- other child,—another and the same,—with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indis- tinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it. | There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the 240 DEAE ARLE RIDE ITER aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was. “T have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive min- ister, “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 Loth 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 Dimmes- dale 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 to- wards her mother’s breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny {mage of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too. THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 241 “Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me?f’’ 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 unac- customed 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, giv- ing emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl. “Fasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee!’’ cried Hester Prynne, who, however inured to such behavior on the elf-child’s part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. “Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!’ But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother’s threats any more than mollified by her entreaties, now sud- denly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently and throwing her small figure into the most extrava- gant 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 multi- tudeywere lending her their sympathy and encourage- ment. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy — wrath of Pearl’s image, crowned and girdled with flow- ers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom! “T see what ails the child,’ whispered Hester to the 242 DHE SCARTE Were k 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 irlisses something which she has always seen me wear!” “TI 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, “T know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl’s young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me!’’ Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergymari, 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. J 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 DHE DATE BROOK-SIDE” 243 dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The mid- ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up forever !”’ With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space!—she had drawn an hour’s free breath !—and here again was the scarlet misery, glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom. Hester next gath- ered 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 rich- ness of her womanhood, departed, like fading sun- shine; 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?” “Ves; ttow 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 what- 244 Te SC Ak BT ECan ever comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish—~Pearl put up her mouth, and kissed the scar- let 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 dear child,” answered Hester. “But in days to come, he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not?” “And will he always keep his hand over his heart?” inquired Pearl. “Foolish child, what a question is that!’ exclaimed her mother. “Come and ask his blessing!” But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every petted child towards a dangerous tival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and manifesting her re- luctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since her habyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series TOP Cote D ARI HE BROOK-SIDE: 245 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. MHereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the un- welcome kiss was quite washed off, and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the clergy~ man; while they talked together, and made such ar- rangements as were suggested by their new position, and the purposes soon to be fulfilled. And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be left a solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mvstery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerful- ness 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 o1 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 deter- mined 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 246 , THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 247 America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans, scattered thinly along the seaboard. Not to speak of the clergyman’s health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state, the more delicately adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbor; one of those questionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and, within three days’ time, would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne—whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew—could take upon herself to secure the pas- sage of two individuals and a child, with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable. The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present. “That is most fortunate!” he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate, we hesi- tate 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 Ser- mon; and as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. “At least, 248 THE SCARLET LETTER a they shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I leave no public duty unperformed, nor ill per- formed!’ Sad, indeed, that an introspection so pro- found and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably deceived! We had 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 un- accustomed physical energy, and hurried him town- ward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural ob- stacles, 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, cll the difficulties of the track, with an unwearitable activity that aston- ished 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 them- selves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, nor two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 249 a weathercock at every point where his memory sug. gested one. Not the less, however, came this importu- nately obtrusive sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and alf 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 be- stowed 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 transforma- tion. 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 250 TE VSOARDER LETIER 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 im- pulses now communicated to the unfortunate and star- tled 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 patriar- chal 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 re- spect 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 mo- ments 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 DHE MINISTER IN A MAZE 251 his tongue should wag itself, in utterance of these hor- rible 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. Hurry« ing along the street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his church; a most pious and exemplary old dame; poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied grave- stones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her de- vout old soul, by religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continu- ally for more than thirty years. And, since Mr. Dim- mesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam’s chief earthly comfort—which, unless it had been like- wise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all— was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set pur- pose, 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 252 DLE BS CALI Ty Tein Bare of an intensely poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recol- lect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good widow’s comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale. Again a third instance. After parting from the old church-member, he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won—and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil—to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, impart- ing to religion the warmth of love, and to love a re- ligious 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 ten- der bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blos- som darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting ‘im as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 253 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 thou- sand 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 sea- man, one of the ship’s crew from the Spanish Main. And, here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed, at least, to shake hands with the tarry blackguard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better principle as partly his natural good taste, and still more his buckramed habit of cler- ical 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 [ 254 THE SOARL EW EE Big 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 fulfil- ment, by suggesting the performance of every wicked- ness which his most foul imagination can conceive?” At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch- lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand appearance; having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Ann Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder. Whether the witch had read the minister’s thoughts or no, she came to a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and—though little given to converse with clergymen—began a conversation. “So, Reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest,’ observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. “The next time, I pray you to al- low 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 poten- tate you wot of!” “T profess, madam,” answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance, such as the lady’s rank demanded, and his own good-breeding made imperative,—“‘I pro- fess, 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 T, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a view ’ THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 255 to gaining the favor of such a personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won from heathendom!” “Ha, ha, ha!’ cackled the old witch-lady, still nod- ding her high head-dress at the minister. “Well, well, we must needs talk thus in the daytime! You carry i off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the for- est, we shall have other talk together !’’ She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognize a secret intimacy of connection. “Have I then sold myself,” thought the minister, “to the fiend whom, if men say true, this yellow- starched and velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and master!” The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself, with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad cones. Scorn, bitter- -ness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt, even while they frightened him. And his en- ' counter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show his sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits. He had, by this time, reached his dwelling, on the edge of the burial-ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The minister was glad to 256 THE SCARLET LETTER have reached this shelter, without first betraying him- self to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been continually im- pelled 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-del! 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 sen- tence 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 be- hold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood, white THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 259 and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew Scrip- tures, 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 out- ward 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 en- emy. 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 Chilling- worth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which they sustained towards one another. 258 THE SCARLET LETTER Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep fright- fully near the secret. “Were it not better,” said he, “that you use my poor skill to-night? Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great things from you; apprehending that ang year may come about, and find their pastor gone.” “Yea, to anoth.r world,” replied the minister, uh 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.” “T 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!” “T 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 Jeru- salem, 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, THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 259 that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ- pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved forever, he drove his task on- _ward, 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 be- _ dazzled eyes. There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of writter _ space behind him! Ee XXI THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY BreTimeEs 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 ij ; of a dead woman’s features; owing this dreary resem-/ blance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in. re- spect 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- 260 THE NEW ENGLAND :;HOLIDAY. 26r expression unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected, now; unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer might _ have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the _ multitude through seven miserable years as a neccs- | sity, 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 con- vert what had so long been agony into a kind of tri- -umph. “Look your last on the scarlet letter and its _wearer!”—the people’s victim and life-long bond- slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. “Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A - few hours longer, and the deep mysterious ocean will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!” Nor were it an in- consistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hes- _ter’s mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless - draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhila- rating, in its chased and golden beaker; or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bit- terness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cor- dial of intensest potency. Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would 262 THE SCARLE Tu PARE 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, more- over, there was a certain singular inquietude and ex- citement 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, es- pecially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolu- tion, 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; Po eee ee for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome — THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 263 _ green before a village meeting-house, than the centre of a town’s business. _ “Why, what is this, mother?” cried she. ‘‘Where- fore 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,” an- _swered 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 Hes- ter. “For the Governor and the magistrates are to _ go by, and the ministers, and all the great people and _ good people, with the music and the soldiers marching _ before them.” “And will the minister be there?” asked Pearl. “And will he hold out both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?” “He will be there, child,’ answered her mother. “But he will not greet thee to-day; nor must thou | greet him.” _ “What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. “In the dark night- 264 THE SCARLET LETTER time he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my fore- | head, 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 work- | shops 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 re- joice; 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 cen- turies—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 man- | THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 265 ners of the age. The persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Pu- ritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Eliza- bethan 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 wit- nessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageant- ries and processions. Nor would it have been im- practicable, 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 fes- tivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an at- tempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendor, a col- orless 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 com- monwealth—the statesman, the priest, and the soldier —deemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social eminence. All came forth, to move in procession be- fore the people’s “eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed. , ——_ 266 LILO O Als El od ee I Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not en- couraged, 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 glee- man, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry An- drew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps hun- dreds of years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocular- ity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling- matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the mar- ket-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 Dur pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter PIE NEVO NGLAND HOLIDAY... (267 business was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the maj- esty 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 deport- ment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their de- scendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritan- ism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety. The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians—in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear—stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This dis- tinction could more justly be claimed by some mari- ners,—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Span- ish Main,—who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the waist ~~) 268 DA BV CARI Tit Fal ian 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 be- havior that were binding on all others; smoking to- bacco 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-vite from pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gap- ing crowd around them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks | in a modern court of justice. But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in, the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traf- fic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 26q hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it ex- cited neither surprise nor animadversion when so rep- utable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the phy- sicilan, 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 rib- bons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales. After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled idly through the market- place ; until happening to approach the spot where Hes- ter Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize, and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area— a sort of magic circle—had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one an- other at a little distance, none ventured, or felt dis- posed, to intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral 270 Fi ES Orie EV Ee ree 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-creattires. Now, if never before, it an- swered a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being over- heard; and so changed was Hester Prynne’s repute before the public, that the matron in town most emi- nent for rigid morality could not have held such inter- course with less result of scandal than herself. “So, mistréss,’’ said the mariner, “I must bid the steward make ready one more berth than you bar- gained for! No fear of scurvy or ship-fever this voy- age! 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 Hes- ter, with a mien of calmness, though in the utmost tonsternation. “They have long dwelt = = = = = = S = te ss 85 = S 2=N5 P = => = = NS = SS — 7 => ‘ ) = = = = = { a= Ss S : = = = ; eS Be: z a\\= = r ] = = ii = = 7 = = { = = = = é g => =~ = => SS = S 2 = = |i = = Ses ENS : = = | | i = => i = = Sy = = 2 = = = = = = = = mM = = ae ce EE Je | 1 ™M |