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Chapter XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water,
and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should
have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child
flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet
went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there
she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left
by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in.
Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening
curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image
of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited
to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary
little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say—"This
is a better place; come thou into the pool." And Pearl, stepping
in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while,
out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of
fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.
Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. "I would speak
a word with you," said she—"a word that concerns us much."
"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping
posture. "With all my heart! Why, mistress, I hear good tidings
of you on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a
magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your
affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been
question concerning you in the council. It was debated whether
or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter
might be taken off your ***. 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 ***!"
All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man,
and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a
change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It
was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces
of advancing life were visible he bore his age well, and seemed
to retain a wiry vigour and alertness. But the former aspect of
an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what
she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been
succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully
guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this
expression with a smile, but the latter played him false, and
flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator could
see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too,
there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old
man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within
his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown
into a momentary flame. This he repressed as speedily as
possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had
happened.
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will
only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's
office. This unhappy person had effected such a transformation
by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of
a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and
adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and
gloated over.
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's ***. Here was
another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to
her.
"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look
at it so earnestly?"
"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears
bitter enough for it," answered she. "But let it pass! It is of
yonder miserable man that I would speak."
"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he
loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it
with the only person of whom he could make a confidant. "Not to
hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to
be busy with the gentleman. So speak freely and I will make
answer."
"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years
ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as
touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the
life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed
no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your
behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus
bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human
beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something
whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep
your counsel. Since that day no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him,
sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and
rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause
him to die daily a living death, and still he knows you not. In
permitting this I have surely acted a false part by the only man
to whom the power was left me to be true!"
"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger,
pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into
a dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"
"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.
"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth
again. "I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever
physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as
I have wasted on this miserable priest! But for my aid his life
would have burned away in torments within the first two years
after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For, Hester, his
spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine
has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. Oh, I could
reveal a goodly secret! But enough. What art can do, I have
exhausted on him. That he now breathes and creeps about on earth
is owing all to me!"
"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.
"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth,
letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes.
"Better had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this
man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy!
He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling
always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual
sense—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as
this—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his
heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him,
which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the
eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his
brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be
tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting
of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits
him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most
vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this
perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not
err, there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a
human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment."
The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted
his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some
frightful shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the
place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those
moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of
years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his
mind's eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as
he did now.
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look. "Has he not paid thee all?"
"No, no! He has but increased the debt!" answered the
physician, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer
characteristics, and subsided into gloom. "Dost thou remember
me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in the
autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life
had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years,
bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and
faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the
other—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No life
had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich
with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not,
though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for
others, craving little for himself—kind, true, just and of
constant, if not warm affections? Was I not all this?"
"All this, and more," said Hester.
"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his
features. "I have already told thee what I am—a fiend! Who made
me so?"
"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering. "It was I, not less
than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"
"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger
Chillingworth. "If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!"
He laid his finger on it with a smile.
"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.
"I judged no less," said the physician. "And now what wouldst
thou with me touching this man?"
"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must
discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result I
know not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him,
whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid. So far
as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and
his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands.
Nor do I—whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth,
though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the
soul—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer
a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no
good for me, no good for thee. There is no good for little
Pearl. There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze."
"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth,
unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a
quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed.
"Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier
with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity
thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature."
"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge
it out of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake,
then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave his further
retribution to the Power that claims it! I said, but now, that
there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are
here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and
stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn
our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee
alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy
will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou
reject that priceless benefit?"
"Peace, Hester—peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy
sternness—"it is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power
as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back
to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy
first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since
that moment it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have
wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion;
neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from
his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it
may! Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man."
He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.
XV. HESTER AND PEARL
So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked—took leave of
Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He
gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it
into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the
ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little
while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether
the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath
him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and
brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of
herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather.
Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the
sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species
hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or
might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be
converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch?
Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really
fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of
ominous shadow moving along with his deformity whichever way he
turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not
suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot,
where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade,
dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the
climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?
Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much
the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?
"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she
gazed after him, "I hate the man!"
She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome
or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those
long-past days in a distant land, when he used to emerge at
eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the
firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile.
He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that
the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken
off the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared not
otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal
medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her
ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have
been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that
she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his
hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle
and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed
by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him,
that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had
persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.
"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery
and wrought out no repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after
the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark
light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might
not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no
loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer
of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully
with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom
forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for
herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable
sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was
unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little
boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,
and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant
in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the
shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize
of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in
the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that streaked the
line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great
snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that
fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up
her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after
these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting
them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was
almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a
broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her
sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little
being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl
herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus
assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her
mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last
touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and
imitated, as best she could, on her own *** 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 ***.
"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the
green letter, and on thy childish ***, 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 ***?—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 ***; 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 ***. 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 ***. 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 *** yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race. "Will not it come of its own accord when
I am a woman grown?"
"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine.
It will soon be gone."
Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to
perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in
the midst of it, all brightened by its splendour, and
scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The
light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a
playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step
into the magic circle too.
"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.
"See!" answered Hester, smiling; "now I can stretch out my hand
and grasp some of it."
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge
from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features,
her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it
into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about
her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade. There
was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense
of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never
failing vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness,
which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with
the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps
this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy
with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl's
birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard,
metallic lustre to the child's character. She wanted—what some
people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch
her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy. But
there was time enough yet for little Pearl.
"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot
where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine—"we will sit down a
little way within the wood, and rest ourselves."
"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl. "But you
may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile."
"A story, child!" said Hester. "And about what?"
"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold
of her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half
mischievously, into her face.
"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big,
heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers
his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among
the trees; and they are to write their names with their own
blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms. Didst thou
ever meet the Black Man, mother?"
"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother,
recognising a common superstition of the period.
"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where
you watched last night," said the child. "But she fancied me
asleep while she was talking of it. She said that a thousand and
a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book,
and have his mark on them. And that ugly tempered lady, old
Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame said that
this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that
it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight,
here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou go to
meet him in the nighttime?"
"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.
"Not that I remember," said the child. "If thou fearest to leave
me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I
would very gladly go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a
Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?"
"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her
mother.
"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.
"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. "This
scarlet letter is his mark!"
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger
along the forest track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap
of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been
a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade,
and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising
gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst,
over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees impending
over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which
choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black
depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier
passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown,
sparkling sand. Letting the eyes follow along the course of the
stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at
some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces
of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and
here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All
these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on
making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing,
perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should
whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it
flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like
the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without
playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance
and events of sombre hue.
"Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried
Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad?
Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and
murmuring!"
But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the
forest trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it
could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else
to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of
her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the
little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily
along her course.
"What does this sad little brook say, mother?" inquired she.
"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee
of it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine.
But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise
of one putting aside the branches. I would have thee betake
thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes
yonder."
"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.
"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not
stray far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my
first call."
"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt
thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big
book under his arm?"
"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently. "It is no Black
Man! Thou canst see him now, through the trees. It is the
minister!"
"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother, he has his hand
over his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name
in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why
does he not wear it outside his ***, 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 ***.
"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 ***! Mine burns in secret!
Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a
seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for
what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy!—to
whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could
daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners,
methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much
of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!—all
emptiness!—all death!"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak.
Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he
did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances
in which to interpose what she came to say. She conquered her
fears, and spoke:
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she,
"with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of
it!" Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an
effort.—"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with
him, under the same roof!"
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and
clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his
***.
"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine
own roof! What mean you?"
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for
which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him
to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at
the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than
malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the
magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.
There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night
of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more
accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth—the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all
the air about him—and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual
infirmities—that these bad opportunities had been turned to a
cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not
to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once—nay,
why should we not speak it?—still so passionately loved! Hester
felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death
itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have
been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had
taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on
the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I
have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might
have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save
when thy good—thy life—thy fame—were put in question! Then I
consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would
say? That old man!—the physician!—he whom they call Roger
Chillingworth!—he was my husband!"
The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that
violence of passion, which—intermixed in more shapes than one
with his higher, purer, softer qualities—was, in fact, the
portion of him which the devil claimed, and through which he
sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer
frown than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it
lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character had
been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower
energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he—"I did know it! Was not
the secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the
first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why
did I not understand? Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little, little
knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame!—the
indelicacy!—the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick
and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!—I cannot forgive
thee!"
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the
fallen leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!"
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around
him, and pressed his head against her ***, 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 *** of the fallen woman! Here seen only by her
eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one
moment true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth
knows your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he
continue, then, to keep our secret? What will now be the course
of his revenge?"
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices
of his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the
secret. He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark
passion."
"And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with
this deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking
within himself, and pressing his hand nervously against his
heart—a gesture that had grown involuntary with him. "Think for
me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!"
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly
and firmly. "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"
"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister. "But how
to avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again
on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst
tell me what he was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?"
"Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the
tears gushing into her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness?
There is no other cause!"
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it."
"Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise me what to do."
"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing
her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a
magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it
could hardly hold itself erect. "Doth the universe lie within
the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but
a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads
yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!
Yes; but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper into the
wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some
few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the
white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would
bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to
one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough
in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth?"
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the
minister, with a sad smile.
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester.
"It brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee
back again. In our native land, whether in some remote rural
village, or in vast London—or, surely, in Germany, in France,
in pleasant Italy—thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and
their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too
long already!"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were
called upon to realise a dream. "I am powerless to go. Wretched
and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on
my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed
me. Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for
other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful
sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his
dreary watch shall come to an end!"
"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own
energy. "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not
cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path:
neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to
cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath
happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou
exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so!
The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness
to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false
life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to
such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or, as
is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and
the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act!
Do anything, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of
Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one,
such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou
tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so
gnawed into thy life? that have made thee feeble to will and to
do? that will leave thee powerless even to repent? Up, and
away!"
"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful
light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away,
"thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are
tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the
strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange,
difficult world alone!"
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken
spirit. He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed
within his reach.
He repeated the word—"Alone, Hester!"
"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!
XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which
hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and
a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely
hinted at, but dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity,
and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from
society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation
as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered,
without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of
which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their
fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more
reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the
church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set
her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had
been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her
strong, but taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so
fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this
had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts—for those it was easy to arrange—but
each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of
the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was
only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and
even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the
fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer
within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole
seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a
preparation for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such
a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation
of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat that he was
broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was
darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it;
that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a
hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance;
that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and
the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this
poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick,
miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy
doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth
spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human
soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched
and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again
into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults,
select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had
formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and near
it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it
suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall
one instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake
of that earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now—since I am
irrevocably doomed—wherefore should I not *** the solace
allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if
this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me,
I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither can
I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she
to sustain—so tender to soothe! O Thou to whom I dare not lift
mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?"
"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the
dungeon of his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere
of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region. His spirit
rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect
of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him
grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious temperament,
there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.
"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself.
"Methought the germ of it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art
my better angel! I seem to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained,
and sorrow-blackened—down upon these forest leaves, and to have
risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that
hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we
not find it sooner?"
"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is
gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this
symbol I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!"
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet
letter, and, taking it from her ***, threw it to a distance
among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the
hither verge of the stream. With a hand's-breadth further
flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have given the
little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the
unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But
there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,
which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the
burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O
exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt
the freedom! By another impulse, she took off the formal cap
that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders,
dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features.
There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek,
that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole
richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the
irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope,
and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this
hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the
effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their
sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth
burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure
forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the
solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto,
embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook
might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of
mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by
higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether
newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always
create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that
it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept
its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and
bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.
"Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast
seen her—yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other
eyes. She is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou
wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal
with her!"
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust—a backwardness to be
familiar with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!"
"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But she will love
thee dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her.
Pearl! Pearl!"
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is,
standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other
side of the brook. So thou thinkest the child will love me?"
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at
some distance, as the minister had described her, like a
bright-apparelled vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her
through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making
her figure dim or distinct—now like a real child, now like a
child's spirit—as the splendour went and came again. She heard
her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother
sat talking with the clergyman. The great black forest—stern as
it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of
the world into its ***—became the playmate of the lonely
infant, as well as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her. It offered her the
partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but
ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon
the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with
their wild flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly
took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon
repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to
be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to
come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm.
A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree,
chattered either in anger or merriment—for the squirrel is such
a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to
distinguish between his moods—so he chattered at the child, and
flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year's nut, and
already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his
sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively
at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or
renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said—but here the
tale has surely lapsed into the improbable—came up and smelt of
Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her
hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a
kindred wilderness in the human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of
the settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The Bowers appeared
to know it, and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with
me!"—and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and
anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green,
which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these she
decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph
child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest
sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned
herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.
Slowly—for she saw the clergyman!
XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and
the minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her
beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those
simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds,
and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better!
She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!"
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an
unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at
thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought—oh, Hester,
what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!—that my
own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly
that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!"
"No, no! Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile.
"A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace
whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks with
those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies,
whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet
us."
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In
her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered
to the world, these seven past years, as the living
hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly
sought to hide—all written in this symbol—all plainly
manifest—had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read
the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their
being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt
that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined
when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual
idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together;
thoughts like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they did
not acknowledge or define—threw an awe about the child as she
came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange—no passion or eagerness—in thy
way of accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful
and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is generally
intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the
why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She
loves me, and will love thee!"
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it! But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee,
nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart,
and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my
arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime,
hath been kind to me! The first time—thou knowest it well! The
last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder
stern old Governor."
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!"
answered the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing. She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon
learn to love thee!"
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and
stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the
clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk
waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the brook
chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a
perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and
wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the
reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which
Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim
medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified
with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a
certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another
child—another and the same—with likewise its ray of golden
light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing
manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her lonely
ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in
which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's.
Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been
admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so
modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where
she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that
this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou
canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit,
who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to
cross a running stream? Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves."
"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching
out both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so
sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy
friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward as
thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across the brook and come
to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!"
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand—with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary—stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched
out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the
mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny
image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
"Thou strange child! why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed
Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on
her brow—the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester
Prynne, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the
elf-child's part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a
more seemly deportment now. "Leap across the brook, naughty
child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!"
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more
than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit
of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods
reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she was in her
childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden
multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's
image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's ***.
"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 ***.
Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it
in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her
as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of
fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an
hour's free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery
glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified
or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of
doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and
confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering
spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of
her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow
seemed to fall across her.
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl.
"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she,
reproachfully, but with a subdued tone. "Wilt thou come across
the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon
her—now that she is sad?"
"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the
brook, and clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother
indeed! and I am thy little Pearl!"
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew
down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks.
But then—by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child
to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb
of anguish—Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet
letter, too.
"That was not kind!" said Hester. "When thou hast shown me a
little love, thou mockest me!"
"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.
"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother. "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves
thy mother, too. Wilt thou not love him? Come he longs to greet
thee!"
"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute
intelligence into her mother's face. "Will he go back with us,
hand in hand, we three together, into the town?"
"Not now, my child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he
will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside
of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach
thee many things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him—wilt
thou not?"
"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired
Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive
with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from
whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no
favour to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion of force
that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and
manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since
her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could
transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The
minister—painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might
prove a talisman to admit him into the child's kindlier
regards—bent forward, and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon,
Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook,
stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome
kiss was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of
the gliding water. She then remained apart, silently watching
Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together and made
such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and
the purposes soon to be fulfilled.
And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell
was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which,
with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had
passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy
brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its
little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept
up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone
than for ages heretofore.
XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little
Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should
discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the
mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the
woods. So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be
received as real. But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe,
still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had
overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since
been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with
earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together,
and find a single hour's rest and solace. And there was Pearl,
too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook—now that the
intrusive third person was gone—and taking her old place by her
mother's side. So the minister had not fallen asleep and
dreamed!
In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity
of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he
recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and
himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined
between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities,
offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the
wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an
Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered
thinly along the sea-board. Not to speak of the clergyman's
health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life,
his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would
secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and
refinement; the higher the state the more delicately adapted to
it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a
ship lay in the harbour; one of those unquestionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of
the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable
irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived
from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time would sail
for Bristol. Hester Prynne—whose vocation, as a self-enlisted
Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain
and crew—could take upon herself to secure the passage of two
individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances
rendered more than desirable.
The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest,
the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to
depart. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present.
"This is most fortunate!" he had then said to himself. Now, why
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we
hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless—to hold nothing back from the
reader—it was because, on the third day from the present, he
was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion
formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England
Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode
and time of terminating his professional career. "At least, they
shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no
public duty unperformed or ill-performed!" Sad, indeed, that an
introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's
should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still
have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so
pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable,
of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the
real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable
period, can wear one face to himself and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be
the true.
The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical
energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway
among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude
natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he
remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the
plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush,
climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable
activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled
over the same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the
town, he took an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not
yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago,
since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace
of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of
the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a
weather-*** at every point where his memory suggested one. Not
the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of
change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he
met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the
little town. They looked neither older nor younger now; the
beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe
of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on
whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the
minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their
mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as
he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so
very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr.
Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had
seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,
indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a
change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might
have said to the friends who greeted him—"I am not the man for
whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn
into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,
his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not
flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no
doubt, would still have insisted with him—"Thou art thyself the
man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling.
In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the
impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild,
wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing
out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.
For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal
privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy
character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use
and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect,
which the minister's professional and private claims alike
demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and
respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and
inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it
was only by the most careful self-control that the former could
refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose
into his mind, respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely
trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag
itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own
consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And,
even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid
laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon
would have been petrified by his minister's impiety.
Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the
street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest
female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old
dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of
reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead
friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied
gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy
sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by
religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith
she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years. And
since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's
chief earthly comfort—which, unless it had been likewise a
heavenly comfort, could have been none at all—was to meet her
pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed
with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth,
from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously
attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of
putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the
great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of
Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it
then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the
immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her
mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down
dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous
infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could never
afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder
in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to
the good widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted
after a method of its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked
back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy
that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so
wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church
member, he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden
newly-won—and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon,
on the Sabbath after his vigil—to barter the transitory
pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume
brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would
gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure as
a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that
he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her
heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity.
Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away
from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this
sorely tempted, or—shall we not rather say?—this lost and
desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to
condense into small compass, and drop into her tender *** 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
*** 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 ***, 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 ***. Whether the witch had
read the minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop,
looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and—though
little given to converse with clergymen—began a conversation.
"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,"
observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him.
"The next time I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I
shall be proud to bear you company. Without taking overmuch upon
myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."
"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave
obeisance, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good
breeding made imperative—"I profess, on my conscience and
character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport
of your words! I went not into the forest to seek a potentate,
neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a
view to gaining the favour of such personage. My one sufficient
object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle
Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath
won from heathendom!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister. "Well, well! we must needs talk thus
in the daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at
midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!"
She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back
her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a
secret intimacy of connexion.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend
whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag
has chosen for her prince and master?"
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with
deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was
good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened
him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a
real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the
burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his
study. The minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world by any of those
strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been
continually impelled while passing through the streets. He
entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books,
its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted
him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray;
here borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to
him, and God's voice through all.
There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an
unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where
his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days
before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked
minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written
thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart,
and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious
curiosity. That self was gone. Another man had returned out of
the forest—a wiser one—with a knowledge of hidden mysteries
which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A
bitter kind of knowledge that!
While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door
of the study, and the minister said, "Come in!"—not wholly
devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he
did! It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered. The minister
stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.
"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found
you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear sir,
you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been
too sore for you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in
heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?"
"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "My
journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free
air which I have breathed have done me good, after so long
confinement in my study. I think to need no more of your drugs,
my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a
friendly hand."
All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister
with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his
patient. But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was
almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or, at least, his
confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with
Hester Prynne. The physician knew then that in the minister's
regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest
enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a part
of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what
security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may
approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus
the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would
touch, in express words, upon the real position which they
sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his
dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.
"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill
tonight? Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong
and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse. The
people look for great things from you, apprehending that another
year may come about and find their pastor gone."
"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious
resignation. "Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good
sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the
flitting seasons of another year! But touching your medicine,
kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it not."
"I joy to hear it," answered the physician. "It may be that my
remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due
effect. Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's
gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"
"I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile. "I thank you, and
can but requite your good deeds with my prayers."
"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave. "Yea, they are the current
gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint mark on
them!"
Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and
requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with
ravenous appetite. Then flinging the already written pages of
the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another,
which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and
emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered
that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn
music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he.
However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved
for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and
ecstasy.
Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he
careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the
curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the
study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled eyes.
There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a
vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!
End of Chapter XX. �