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INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER"

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

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

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

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

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

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

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

The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier
successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

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

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

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

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted
here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known,
disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on
the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any
memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public
notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old
houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-way to
the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for
above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to
the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place
before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had
blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also in due time,
passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous
manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old,
and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long
connexion of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and
burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality,
quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral
circumstances that surround him. It is not love but instinct. The
new inhabitant -- who came himself from a foreign land, or whose
father or grandfather came -- has little claim to be called a
Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster -- like tenacity with
which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping,
clings to the spot where his successive generations have been
embedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he
is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead
level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of
social atmospheres; -- all these, and whatever faults besides he
may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives,
and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise.
So has it been in my case.

I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the
mould of features and cast of character which had all along been
familiar here -- ever, as one representative of the race lay down in
the grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the
main street -- might still in my little day be seen and recognised in
the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that
the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at least
be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a
potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series of
generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other
birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control,
shall strike their roots into accustomed earth.

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

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

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

Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and
considerably to the detriment of my official conscience, they
continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and
loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They spent a good
deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their
chairs tilted back against the walls; awaking, however, once or
twice in the forenoon, to bore one another with the several
thousandth repetition of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that had
grown to be passwords and countersigns among them.

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

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

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

The father of the Custom-House -- the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable
body of tide-waiters all over the United States -- was a certain
permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of
the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in the purple;
since his sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of
the port, had created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it,
at a period of the early ages which few living men can now
remember. This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of
fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most
wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to
discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact
figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and
vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed
-- not young, indeed -- but a kind of new contrivance of Mother
Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-
echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous
quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting
out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion.
Looking at him merely as an animal -- and there was very little
else to look at -- he was a most satisfactory object, from the
thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his
capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights
which he had ever aimed at or conceived of. The careless security
of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but
slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt
contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The original and
more potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of his
animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the very
trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter
qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old
gentleman from walking on all-fours.

He possessed no power of thought no depth of feeling, no
troublesome sensi-bilities: nothing, in short, but a few
commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper which
grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very
respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had
been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of
twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or
maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose,
might have been sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition
through and through with a sable tinge. Not so with our old
Inspector One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden of
these dismal reminiscences. The next moment he was as ready for
sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier than the Collector's
junior clerk, who at nineteen years was much the elder and graver
man of the two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No longer seeking or caring that my name should be blasoned
abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind
of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil
and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-
boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony
that these commodities had paid the impost, and gone regularly
through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a
knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was
carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will never go
again.

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

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

The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the
petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally
much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children
look upon as long-established rank,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It
was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing
to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold
repetition, the long extent from the front door of the Custom-
House to the side entrance, and back again. Great were the
weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers
and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully
lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps.
Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the
Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied
that my sole object -- and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane
man could ever put himself into voluntary motion -- was to get an
appetite for dinner. And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by
the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only
valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise.

So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-house to the
delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there
through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of
"The Scarlet Letter" would ever have been brought before the
public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not
reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I
did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not
be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle
at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of
passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity
of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly
grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?"
that expression seemed to say. "The little power you might have
once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone You have
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn your
wages" In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy
twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

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

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

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

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

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless
and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvel loins gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous
colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his
descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been
something new in literature.

Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly,
with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon
me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on
creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at
every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser
effort would have been to diffuse thought and imagination through
the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright
transparency; to spiritualise the burden that began to weigh so
heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that
lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary
characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine.
The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and
commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it.
At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered
fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find
the letters turn to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a
hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about
this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor
tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the
Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is
dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and
less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt and,
examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in reference
to the effect of public office on the character, not very favourable
to the mode of life in question.

In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects.
Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of long
continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable
personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he
holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business,
which -- though, I trust, an honest one -- is of such a sort that he
does not share in the united effort of mankind.

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

Here was a fine prospect in the distance Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet
my reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow
melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to
discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree
of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured
to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House,
and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest
apprehension -- as it would never be a measure of policy to turn
out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being hardly in the
nature of a public officer to resign -- it was my chief trouble,
therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old
Inspector.

Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me,
finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend -- to make
the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it,
as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A
dreary look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best
definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his
faculties and sensibilities But, all this while, I was giving myself
very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for
me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

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

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

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if
the sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of the
accident which has befallen him.

In my particular case the consolatory topics were close at hand,
and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a
considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view of
my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of
resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who
should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although
beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the
Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years
-- a term long enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break
off old intellectual habits, and make room for new ones: long
enough, and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing
what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being,
and withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled
an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-
pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs -- his tendency to roam, at will, in that
broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than
confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same
household must diverge from one another -- had sometimes made
it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though
with no longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked
upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more
decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which
he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn survivor,
when so many worthier men were falling: and at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration,
to be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet
more humiliating mercy of a friendly one.

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

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

The life of the Custom -- House lies like a dream behind me. The
old Inspector -- who, by-the-bye, l regret to say, was overthrown
and killed by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly have
lived for ever -- he, and all those other venerable personages who
sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view:
white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport
with, and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants --Pingree,
Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt -- these and
many other names, which had such classic familiarity for my ear
six months ago, -- these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so
important a position in the world -- how little time has it required
to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection
It is with an effort that

I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise,
my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of
memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no
portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land,
with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses and
walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for -- though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a
pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my
forefathers -- there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere
which a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of
his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar
ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.

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

I.

THE PRISON DOOR

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

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

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

II.

THE MARKET-PLACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a
large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw
off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being
beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion,
had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black
eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine
gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity,
rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace
which is now recognised as its indication.

And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the
antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the
prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to
behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were
astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone
out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she
was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there
was some thing exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed,
she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and had modelled
much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her
spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and
picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as
it were, transfigured the wearer -- so that both men and women
who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now
impressed as if they beheld her for the first time -- was that
SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated
upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by
herself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

THE RECOGNITION

FROM this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure
which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his
native garb was standing there; but the red men were not so
infrequent visitors of the English settlements that one of them
would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time;
much less would he have excluded all other objects

and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and evidently
sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a
strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.

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

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

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

"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman? -- and
wherefore is she here set up to public shame?" "You must needs be
a stranger in this region, friend," answered the townsman, looking
curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, "else you
would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her evil
doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly
Master Dimmesdale's church. "

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

"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to
find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and
punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly
New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife
of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago
dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some good time agone he was
minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the
Massachusetts.

To this purpose he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to
look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two
years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston,
no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne;
and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance --
"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which
Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery,
appended to the meeting-house. It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the
magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are
describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four sergeants
about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honour. He wore a
dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a
black velvet tunic beneath -- a gentleman advanced in years, with a
hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be
the head and representative of a community which owed its origin
and progress, and its present state of development, not to the
impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of
manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much,
precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other
eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the
forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine
institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.

But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to
select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should
he less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart,
and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid
aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She
seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might
expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as
she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew
pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend
and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great
scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and
withal a man of kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however,
had been less carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and
was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with
him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his
skull-cap, while his grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of
his study, were winking, like those of Hester's infant, in the
unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved
portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons, and
had no more right than one of those portraits would have to step
forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt,
passion, and anguish "Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have
striven with my young brother here, under whose preaching of the
Word you have been privileged to sit" -- here Mr. Wilson laid his
hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him -- "I have
sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with
you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright
rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and
blackness of your sin.

Knowing your natural temper better than l, he could the better
judge what arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such
as might prevail over your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that
you should no longer hide the name of him who tempted you to
this grievous fall. But he opposes to me -- with a young man's
over-softness, albeit wise beyond his years -- that it were wronging
the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's
secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a
multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in the
commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What say
you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I,
that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hester shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

THE INTERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with
strongly marked apprehension into his face.

"Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered
she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the
cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the
bed, where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair
which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She
could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt that --
having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a
refined cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief of physical
suffering -- he was next to treat with her as the man whom she had
most deeply and irreparably injured. "Hester," said he, "I ask not
wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into the pit, or say, rather, thou
hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy on which I found thee. The
reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I -- a
man of thought -- the book-worm of great libraries -- a man
already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry
dream of knowledge -- what had I to do with youth and beauty like
thine own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude
myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical
deformity in a young girl's fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages
were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this.
I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal
forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first
object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing
up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment
when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair,
I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the
end of our path!"

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

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

"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beware!"

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

"Swear it!" rejoined he. And she took the oath.

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

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

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

V.

HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end. Her
prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the
sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and
morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the
scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in
her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison than
even in the procession and spectacle that have been described,
where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind
was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an
unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of
her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of
lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a

separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and
to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up
the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years.
The very law that condemned her -- a giant of stem featured but
with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm --
had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But
now, with this unattended walk from her prison door, began the
daily custom; and she must either sustain and carry it forward by
the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could
no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present
grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the
next day, and so would the next: each its own trial, and yet the very
same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days
of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden
for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down;
for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their
misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up
her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which
the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might
vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful
passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her,
with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast -- at her, the child of
honourable parents -- at her, the mother of a babe that would
hereafter be a woman -- at her, who had once been innocent -- as
the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the
infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple
abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest
materials and the most sombre hue, with only that one ornament --
the scarlet letter -- which it was her doom to wear. The child's
attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we
may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to
heighten the airy charm that early began to develop itself in the
little girl, but which appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We
may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that small expenditure
in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous
means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who
not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them.

Much of the time, which she might readily have applied to the
better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments
for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this
mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of
enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She
had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic -- a
taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite
productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the
possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a
pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil
of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of
expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life.

Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of
conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared,
no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful,
something that might be deeply wrong beneath.

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

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

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

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

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

VI.

PEARL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

THE GOVERNOR'S HALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII.

THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap -- such as
elderly gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their
domestic privacy -- walked foremost, and appeared to be showing
off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

THE LEECH

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

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the
learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a
common measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life,
had made him extensively acquainted with the medical science of
the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself and as such
was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical
profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it
would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other
emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human
frame, it may be that the higher and more subtle faculties of such
men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of
existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which
seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself.
At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as
medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the
guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and
godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his favour than any
that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only
surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that
noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor.

To such a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant
acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous
and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy
contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous
ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result
had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he
had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and
roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple
medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as
large a share of his own confidence as the European
Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent
centuries in elaborating.

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

Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the
prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all
untimely, when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town.
His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence,
dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting from the nether
earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to the
miraculous. He was now known to be a man of skill; it was
observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms of wild-flowers,
and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the forest-trees like
one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless to
common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and
other famous men -- whose scientific attainments were esteemed
hardly less than supernatural -- as having been his correspondents
or associates. Why, with such rank in the learned world, had he
come hither?

What, could he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in the
wilderness? In answer to this query, a rumour gained ground -- and
however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people --
that Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an
eminent Doctor of Physic from a German university bodily
through the air and setting him down at the door of Mr.
Dimmesdale's study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew
that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-
effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to
see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune
arrival.

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

"I need no medicine," said he.

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

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

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

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

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

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the
medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the
disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look
into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so
different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. For
the sake of the minister's health, and to enable the leech to gather
plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-
shore, or in the forest; mingling various walks with the splash and
murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the
tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the guest of the other in his
place of study and retirement There was a fascination for the
minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he
recognised an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or
scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would
have vainly looked for among the members of his own profession.
In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to find this attribute in the
physician.

Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist, with the
reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that
impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its
passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of
society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views;
it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a
faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron
framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous
enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the
universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those
with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were
thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and
stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-
light, or obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it
sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh
and chill to be long breathed with comfort. So the minister, and the
physician with him, withdrew again within the limits of what their
Church defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both as
he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in
the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when
thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call
out something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it
essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do
him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases
of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In
Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and
sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to
have its groundwork there.

So Roger Chillingworth -- the man of skill, the kind and friendly
physician -- strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving
among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing
everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark
cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has
opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill to
follow it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid
the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity,
and a nameless something more let us call it intuition; if he show
no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable prominent characteristics of
his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to
bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last
shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have
thought if such revelations be received without tumult, and
acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy as by silence,
an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all
is understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the
advantages afforded by his recognised character as a physician; --
then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be
dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing
all its mysteries into the daylight.

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

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

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good
social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on
which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been
built. It the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on
one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections,
suited to their respective employments, in both minister and man
of physic. The motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr.
Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy
window-curtains, to create a noontide shadow when desirable.

The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to be from the
Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the Scriptural story
of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colours still
unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene almost as
grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale
clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios
of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of
which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried
that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail
themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory: not such as a
modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but
provided with a distilling apparatus and the means of compounding
drugs and chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how
to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these
two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain,
yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and
bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's
business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as
we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of
Providence had done all this for the purpose -- besought in so
many public and domestic and secret prayers -- of restoring the
young minister to health.

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

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

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

X.

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

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

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

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

Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning
over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for
the welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments,
natural piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated
by revelation -- all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better
than rubbish to the seeker -- he would turn back, discouraged, and
begin his quest towards another point. He groped along as
stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a
thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep -- or, it
may be, broad awake -- with purpose to steal the very treasure
which this man guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his
premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak; his
garments would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a forbidden
proximity, would be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr.
Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect
of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that something
inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him. But
Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost
intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards
him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising,

but never intrusive friend.

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

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

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

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

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

"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear,
wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the
adjacent burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open
window -- for it was summer-time -- the minister beheld Hester
Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed the
enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of
those moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they
occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere of
sympathy or human contact. She now skipped irreverently from
one grave to another; until coming to the broad, flat, armorial
tombstone of a departed worthy -- perhaps of Isaac Johnson
himself -- she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's
command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously,
little Pearl paused gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock
which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she
arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the
maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was,
tenaciously adhered.

Hester did not pluck them off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

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

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

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

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

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

After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

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

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

XI

THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

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

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme
Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all,
less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence -- using
the avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance,
pardoning, where it seemed most to punish -- had substituted for
his black devices A revelation, he could almost say, had been
granted to him. It mattered little for his object, whether celestial or
from what other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations
betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external
presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter, seemed to be
brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend
its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only,
but a chief actor in the poor minister's interior world.

He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a
throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed
only to know the spring that controlled the engine: and the
physician knew it well. Would he startle him with sudden fear? As
at the waving of a magician's wand, up rose a grisly phantom -- up
rose a thousand phantoms -- in many shapes, of death, or more
awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing
with their fingers at his breast!

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

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

They would have vainly sought -- had they ever dreamed of
seeking --to express the highest truths through the humblest
medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,
afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually
dwelt.

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

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

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

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with
the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the
church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's
secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge.
Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his
own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting
so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his
custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to
fast -- not however, like them, in order to purify the body, and
render it the fitter medium of celestial illumination -- but
rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of
penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in
utter darkness, sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes,
viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light
which he could throw upon it.

He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured,
but could not purify himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain
often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen
doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness
of the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him, within the
looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned
and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with
them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as
sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the
dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a
saint-like frown, and his mother turning her face away as she
passed by Ghost of a mother -- thinnest fantasy of a mother --
methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her
son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts
had made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little
Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the
scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.

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

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair.

A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment's peace
in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it had been for public
worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down
the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.

XII.

THE MINISTER'S VIGIL

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

It was an obscure night in early May. An unwearied pall of cloud
muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the
same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester
Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned
forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform nor
hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey of the
midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of
discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him,
until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that
the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame, and stiffen
his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and
cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's
prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful
one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge.
Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of
penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with
itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends
rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the
impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and
whose own sister and closely linked companion was that
Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous
gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a
disclosure.

Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden
itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their
fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at
once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet
continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the
same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain
repentance.

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

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

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

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

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

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding
the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could
hardly restrain himself from speaking --"A good evening to you,
venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a
pleasant hour with me!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne "at
Governor Winthrop's death-bed,

and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now going
homeward to my dwelling. "

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

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

"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.

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

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

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

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

A moment longer, my child!" said he.

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

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

"And what other time?" persisted the child.

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

Pearl laughed again.

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

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

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occured
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so
many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to
have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt
whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New
England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of which
the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle
of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener,
however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-
witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying,
and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more
distinctly in his after-thought.

It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be
revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven.

            A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for
Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief was a
favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant
commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar
intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual
discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast
sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a
highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly
self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended
his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament
itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's
history and fate.

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

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

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

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII.

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

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

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

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

It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When
sunshine came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded
across the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one
backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in
the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously. Meeting
them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their
greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on
the scarlet letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so
like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the
latter quality on the public mind.

The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying
common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but
quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is
made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.
Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of this nature,
society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign
countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance,
than she deserved.

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

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

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

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often
conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations
of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in
the flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet,
had little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might
have been far otherwise. Then she might have come down to us in
history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a
religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a
prophetess. She might, and not improbably would, have suffered
death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to
undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment.

But, in the education of her child, the mother's enthusiasm thought
had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of
this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge, the germ and
blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a
host of difficulties. Everything was against her. The world was
hostile. The child's own nature had something wrong in it which
continually betokened that she had been born amiss -- the effluence
of her mother's lawless passion -- and often impelled Hester to ask,
in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor
little creature had been born at all.

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

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

Now, however, her interview with the Reverend

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

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

XIV

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All this, and more," said Hester.

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

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

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

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.

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

"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must
discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result I know
not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose
bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as
concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and his
earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands.

Nor do I -- whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though
it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the soul --nor do I
perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly
emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him as
thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no good for
thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to guide us
out of this dismal maze. "

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

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

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

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

XV.

HESTER AND PEARL

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

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

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or
lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days
in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the
seclusion of his study and sit down in the firelight of their home,
and in the light of her nuptial smile.

He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the
chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off
the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise
than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her
subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest
remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been!
She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him! She deemed in her crime most to be repented of, that
she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his
hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and
melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by
Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him,
that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded
her to fancy herself happy by his side.

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

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

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

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and
capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child
might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence,
and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to
establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an
unwonted aspect Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child
with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope
for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze,
which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable
passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than
caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which
misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss
your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently
with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business,
leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a
mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer
might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a
far darker colouring.

But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with
her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have
approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and
intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be
imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In
the little chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging
and could have been from the very first -- the steadfast principles
of an unflinching courage -- an uncontrollable will -- sturdy pride,
which might be disciplined into self-respect -- and a bitter scorn of
many things which, when examined, might be found to have the
taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though
hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavours of unripe
fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil
which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a
noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being
awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making
that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with
her investigations about the scarlet letter --"Mother! Mother Why
does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"

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

XVI.

A FOREST WALK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVII.

THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

"Hast thou?" she asked.

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

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

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

"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have
striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have
held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy
good -- thy life -- thy fame -- were put in question!

Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even
though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I
would say? That old man! -- the physician! -- he whom they call
Roger Chillingworth! -- he was my husband!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own
energy. "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber
thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path: neither shalt thou
freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this
wreck and ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with
it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of
this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success.
There is happiness to be enjoyed!

There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a
true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the
teacher and apostle of the red men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a
scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the
cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie
down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make
thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without
fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day
in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life? that have made
thee feeble to will and to do? that will leave thee powerless even to
repent? Up, and away!"

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

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

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

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

XVIII

A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

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

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

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully
transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this had been a
sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.

Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts -- for those it was easy to arrange --but
each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the
social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the
more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its
prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably
hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his
conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an
unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

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

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

"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, 1 would yet endure, for the sake of that
earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now -- since I am irrevocably
doomed -- wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the
condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a
better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain -- so tender to soothe!
O Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon
me?"

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

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

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

"Let us not lock back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol I

undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!"

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

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

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

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

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

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

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

Pearl! Pearl!"

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

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

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

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The Bowers appeared to
know it, and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!"

-- and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones,
and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the
old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her
hair and her young waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant
dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique
wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard her
mother's voice, and came slowly back

Slowly -- for she saw the clergyman.

XIX.

THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first time -- thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst
her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bring it hither!" said Hester.

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

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

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up
the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom.

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

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl "Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she,
reproachfully, but with a subdued tone. "Wilt thou come across the
brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her -
- now that she is sad?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XX.

THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

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

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

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

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

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

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him
other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and
feeling.

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

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

Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church member,
he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won
-- and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the
Sabbath after his vigil -- to barter the transitory pleasures of the
world for the heavenly hope that was to assume brighter substance
as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom
with final glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in
Paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined
within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy
curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love,
and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led
the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her
into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or -- shall we not rather
say? -- this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-
fiend whispered him to condense into small compass, and drop into
her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom
darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes.

Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as
she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of
innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite

with but a word. So -- with a mightier struggle than he had yet
sustained -- he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried
onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young
sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She ransacked her
conscience -- which was full of harmless little matters, like her
pocket or her work-bag -- and took herself to task, poor thing! for a
thousand imaginary faults, and went about her household duties
with swollen eyelids the next morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished
sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts
had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew
that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had
done and suffered these things, and written thus far into the
Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this
former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity.

That self was gone. Another man had returned out of the forest -- a
wiser one -- with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the
simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of
knowledge that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXI

THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

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

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

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and
have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the
countenance and mien. Such a spiritual sneer might have
conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through
several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something
which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time
more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert
what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. "Look your
last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"

-- the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied her,
might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your
reach! A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious ocean will
quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn
on her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be
assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in
Hester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her
freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated
with her being. Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a
last, long, breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes,
with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been
perpetually flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to be presented
to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its
chased and golden beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary
languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith she had been
drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.

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

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

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

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

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

"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that -- the black, grim,
ugly-eyed old man!" said Pearl.

"He may nod at thee, if he will; for thou art clad in gray, and
wearest the scarlet letter. But see, mother, how many faces of
strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors! What have
they all come to do, here in the market-place?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business
was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no
idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an
abuse of one of its consecrated places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXII

THE PROCESSION

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

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

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

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

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never,
since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore,
had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with
which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness
of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand
rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly
viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual
and imparted to him by angelical ministrations. It might be the
exhilaration of that potent cordial which is distilled only in the
furnace-glow of earnest and long-continued thought. Or perchance
his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing
music that swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending
wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be

questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale ever heard the music. There
was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force.
But where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying
itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing,
heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the
spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along,
unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like itself.
Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this
occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life
of many days and then are lifeless for as many more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would,
nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot,
whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was
a sense within her -- too ill-defined to be made a thought, but
weighing heavily on

her mind -- that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was
connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a
bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by
darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of
the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp
and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her
spirit, which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance,
because it was played upon and vibrated with her mother's
disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to excite her ever active
and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and, as we might
say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as
she desired it, but without yielding the minutest degree of control
over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they
smiled, were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon
offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity
that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity.