Her face, so long
familiar
to the towns-people, showed
the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there.
the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there.
Hawthorne - Scarlett Letter
"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, dear child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he will
walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our
own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many
things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not? "
"And will he always keep his hand over his heart? " inquired Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that! " exclaimed her mother. "Come
and ask his blessing! "
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with
every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice
of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It
was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to
him, hanging back, and manifesting her 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 a solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their
multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there,
and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this
other tale to the 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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
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 seaboard. Not to
speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the
hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his
entire development, would secure him a home only in the midst of
civilization and refinement; the higher the state, the more delicately
adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened
that a ship lay in the harbor; one of those questionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the
deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility
of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main,
and, within three days' time, would sail for Bristol. Hester
Prynne--whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had
brought her acquainted with the captain and crew--could take upon
herself to secure the 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. "That 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 honorable epoch in the life
of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more
suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. "At
least, they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I
leave no public duty unperformed, nor 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,
nor two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.
There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered
it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude
of gable-peaks, and a weathercock 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 widow's comprehension,
or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own. Assuredly,
as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine
gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city
on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church-member, he
met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won--and
won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after
his vigil--to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the
heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark
around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She
was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister
knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity
of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan,
that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her
mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted,
or--shall we not rather say? --this lost and desperate man. As she drew
nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass and
drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to
blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense
of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the
minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one
wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So--with a
mightier struggle than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva cloak
before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition,
and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She
ransacked her conscience,--which was full of harmless little matters,
like her pocket or her work-bag,--and took herself to task, poor
thing! for a thousand imaginary faults; and went about her household
duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last
temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and
almost as horrible. It was,--we blush to tell it,--it was to stop
short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of
little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun
to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met
a drunken seaman, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And,
here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor
Mr. Dimmesdale longed, at least, to shake hands with the tarry
blackguard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as
dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid,
satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better
principle as partly his natural good taste, and still more his
buckramed habit of 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 Ann
Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this
last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder.
Whether the witch had read the minister's thoughts, or no, she came to
a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily,
and--though little given to converse with clergymen--began a
conversation.
"So, reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest," observed
the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. "The next time, I
pray you to 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 favor of such a
personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of
mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious
souls he hath won from heathendom! "
"Ha, ha, ha! " cackled the old witch-lady, still 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 recognize a secret
intimacy of connection.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend whom,
if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen
for her prince and master! "
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by
a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself, with deliberate choice,
as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the
infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused
throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses,
and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad 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 his sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.
He had, by this time, reached his dwelling, on the edge of the
burial-ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study.
The minister was glad to 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 to-night?
Verily, dear Sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous
for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great
things from you; apprehending that another year may come about, and
find their pastor gone. "
"Yea, 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
forever, 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!
[Illustration]
XXI.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.
Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to
receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and
little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with
the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in
considerable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures,
whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the
forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the
colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years
past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by
its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had
the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline;
while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight
indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own
illumination.
Her face, so long familiar to the towns-people, showed
the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was
like a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's
features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed
out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and
have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance
and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after
sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as
a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to
endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a
kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its
wearer! "--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they
fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be
beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean
will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn
upon her bosom! " Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be
assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in
Hester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom
from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.
Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long,
breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly
all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of
life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich,
delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker; or else
leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness
wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest
potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossible
to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to
the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so
delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel,
was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in
imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The
dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or
inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no
more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea
with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain
singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so
much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the
varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children
have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them;
always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of
whatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was
the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of
her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather
than walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a
wild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached
the market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the
stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like
the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than the
centre of a town's business.
"Why, what is this, mother? " cried she. "Wherefore have all the people
left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See,
there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his
Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any
kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the
old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother? "
"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.
"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that,--the black, grim,
ugly-eyed old man! " said Pearl. "He may nod at thee, if he will; for
thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see,
mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and
sailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-place? "
"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governor
and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great
people and good people, with the music and the soldiers marching
before them. "
"And will the minister be there? " asked Pearl. "And will he hold out
both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the
brook-side? "
"He will be there, child," answered her mother. "But he will not greet
thee to-day; nor must thou greet him. "
"What a strange, sad man is he! " said the child, as if speaking partly
to herself. "In the dark night-time he calls us to him, and holds thy
hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. And
in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip
of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he
kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it
off! But here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us
not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand
always over his heart! "
"Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said her
mother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see
how cheery is everybody's face to-day. The children have come from
their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their
fields, on purpose to be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to
rule over them; and so--as has been the custom of mankind ever since a
nation was first gathered--they make merry and rejoice; as if a good
and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world! "
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the
year--as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part
of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public
joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far
dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single
holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of
Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived
in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life
of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as
stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine
mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque
and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of
this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation,
but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our
forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of
magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the
statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's
eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a
government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece
and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks
of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with
jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their
appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been
sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,
the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but
widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had
witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the
village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive
on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were
essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions of
Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the
market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at
quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the
platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of
defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.
But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was
broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of
one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then
in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare
favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even
at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to
learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint
was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their
savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,
red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow
and stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible
gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild
as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They
were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the
waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even
in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and
quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around
them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,
rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,
not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds
on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be
arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for
instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens
of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the
wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his
reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan
elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned
hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of
these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a
profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which
was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.
There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,
by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this
face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without
undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring
fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to
the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach
the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,
and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed
itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the
scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,
and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered
a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together
without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's
repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for
rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result
of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or
ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other
doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as
there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a
Spanish vessel. "
"What mean you? " inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger? "
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare
with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of
your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that
is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers! "
[Illustration: Chillingworth,--"Smile with a sinister meaning"]
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together. "
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at
that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in
the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile
which--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk
and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
[Illustration]
XXII.
THE PROCESSION.
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where,
in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since
observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.
[Illustration: New England Worthies]
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately
march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps
imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill;
but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and
clarion addresses itself to the multitude,--that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an
instant, the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed
to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and
swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the
shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armor of the
military company, which followed after the music, and formed the
honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with
an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of
martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms,
where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member
of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low
Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won
their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire
array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding
over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age
when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the
quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at
all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the
English settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and
all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence were strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid
wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril,
stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well
represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical
development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of
natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been
ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into
the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in
which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political
life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question--it offered
inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even
political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the
grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he
kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as
at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest
ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed,
his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and
imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration
of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of
earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that
swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural
activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon
to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing,
of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble
frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting
it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown
morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which
they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many
more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless
that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her
reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,
sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known
each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with
the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable
in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the
clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,
that she could scarcely forgive him,--least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer! --for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their
mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,
fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.
When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face.
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook? "
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl! " whispered her mother. "We must
not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the
forest. "
"I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," continued
the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me be gone? "
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him! "
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities--or insanity, as we
should term it--led her to do what few of the towns-people would have
ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet
letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great
magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of
rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the
procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently
cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in
all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in
conjunction with Hester Prynne,--kindly as so many now felt towards
the latter,--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled, and
caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which
the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it! " whispered the old
lady, confidentially, to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he
really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would
think how little while it is since he went forth out of his
study,--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I
warrant,--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that
means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe
him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the
music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was
fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard
changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the
world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path? "
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister
of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale! "
"Fie, woman, fie! " cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the
wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it
in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou
wearest it openly; so there need be no question about that. But this
minister! Let me tell thee, in thine ear!
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, dear child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he will
walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our
own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many
things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not? "
"And will he always keep his hand over his heart? " inquired Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that! " exclaimed her mother. "Come
and ask his blessing! "
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with
every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice
of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It
was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to
him, hanging back, and manifesting her 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 a solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their
multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there,
and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this
other tale to the 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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
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 seaboard. Not to
speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the
hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his
entire development, would secure him a home only in the midst of
civilization and refinement; the higher the state, the more delicately
adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened
that a ship lay in the harbor; one of those questionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the
deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility
of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main,
and, within three days' time, would sail for Bristol. Hester
Prynne--whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had
brought her acquainted with the captain and crew--could take upon
herself to secure the 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. "That 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 honorable epoch in the life
of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more
suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. "At
least, they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I
leave no public duty unperformed, nor 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,
nor two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.
There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered
it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude
of gable-peaks, and a weathercock 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 widow's comprehension,
or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own. Assuredly,
as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine
gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city
on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church-member, he
met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won--and
won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after
his vigil--to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the
heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark
around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She
was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister
knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity
of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan,
that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her
mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted,
or--shall we not rather say? --this lost and desperate man. As she drew
nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass and
drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to
blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense
of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the
minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one
wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So--with a
mightier struggle than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva cloak
before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition,
and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She
ransacked her conscience,--which was full of harmless little matters,
like her pocket or her work-bag,--and took herself to task, poor
thing! for a thousand imaginary faults; and went about her household
duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last
temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and
almost as horrible. It was,--we blush to tell it,--it was to stop
short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of
little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun
to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met
a drunken seaman, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And,
here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor
Mr. Dimmesdale longed, at least, to shake hands with the tarry
blackguard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as
dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid,
satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better
principle as partly his natural good taste, and still more his
buckramed habit of 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 Ann
Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this
last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder.
Whether the witch had read the minister's thoughts, or no, she came to
a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily,
and--though little given to converse with clergymen--began a
conversation.
"So, reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest," observed
the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. "The next time, I
pray you to 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 favor of such a
personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of
mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious
souls he hath won from heathendom! "
"Ha, ha, ha! " cackled the old witch-lady, still 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 recognize a secret
intimacy of connection.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend whom,
if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen
for her prince and master! "
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by
a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself, with deliberate choice,
as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the
infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused
throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses,
and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad 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 his sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.
He had, by this time, reached his dwelling, on the edge of the
burial-ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study.
The minister was glad to 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 to-night?
Verily, dear Sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous
for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great
things from you; apprehending that another year may come about, and
find their pastor gone. "
"Yea, 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
forever, 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!
[Illustration]
XXI.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.
Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to
receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and
little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with
the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in
considerable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures,
whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the
forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the
colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years
past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by
its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had
the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline;
while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight
indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own
illumination.
Her face, so long familiar to the towns-people, showed
the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was
like a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's
features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed
out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and
have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance
and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after
sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as
a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to
endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a
kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its
wearer! "--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they
fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be
beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean
will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn
upon her bosom! " Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be
assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in
Hester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom
from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.
Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long,
breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly
all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of
life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich,
delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker; or else
leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness
wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest
potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossible
to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to
the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so
delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel,
was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in
imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The
dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or
inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no
more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea
with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain
singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so
much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the
varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children
have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them;
always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of
whatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was
the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of
her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather
than walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a
wild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached
the market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the
stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like
the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than the
centre of a town's business.
"Why, what is this, mother? " cried she. "Wherefore have all the people
left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See,
there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his
Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any
kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the
old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother? "
"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.
"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that,--the black, grim,
ugly-eyed old man! " said Pearl. "He may nod at thee, if he will; for
thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see,
mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and
sailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-place? "
"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governor
and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great
people and good people, with the music and the soldiers marching
before them. "
"And will the minister be there? " asked Pearl. "And will he hold out
both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the
brook-side? "
"He will be there, child," answered her mother. "But he will not greet
thee to-day; nor must thou greet him. "
"What a strange, sad man is he! " said the child, as if speaking partly
to herself. "In the dark night-time he calls us to him, and holds thy
hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. And
in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip
of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he
kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it
off! But here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us
not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand
always over his heart! "
"Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said her
mother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see
how cheery is everybody's face to-day. The children have come from
their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their
fields, on purpose to be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to
rule over them; and so--as has been the custom of mankind ever since a
nation was first gathered--they make merry and rejoice; as if a good
and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world! "
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the
year--as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part
of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public
joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far
dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single
holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of
Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived
in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life
of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as
stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine
mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque
and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of
this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation,
but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our
forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of
magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the
statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's
eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a
government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece
and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks
of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with
jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their
appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been
sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,
the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but
widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had
witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the
village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive
on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were
essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions of
Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the
market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at
quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the
platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of
defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.
But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was
broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of
one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then
in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare
favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even
at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to
learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint
was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their
savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,
red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow
and stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible
gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild
as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They
were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the
waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even
in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and
quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around
them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,
rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,
not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds
on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be
arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for
instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens
of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the
wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his
reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan
elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned
hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of
these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a
profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which
was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.
There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,
by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this
face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without
undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring
fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to
the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach
the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,
and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed
itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the
scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,
and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered
a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together
without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's
repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for
rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result
of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or
ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other
doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as
there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a
Spanish vessel. "
"What mean you? " inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger? "
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare
with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of
your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that
is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers! "
[Illustration: Chillingworth,--"Smile with a sinister meaning"]
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together. "
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at
that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in
the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile
which--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk
and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
[Illustration]
XXII.
THE PROCESSION.
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where,
in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since
observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.
[Illustration: New England Worthies]
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately
march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps
imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill;
but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and
clarion addresses itself to the multitude,--that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an
instant, the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed
to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and
swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the
shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armor of the
military company, which followed after the music, and formed the
honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with
an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of
martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms,
where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member
of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low
Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won
their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire
array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding
over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age
when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the
quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at
all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the
English settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and
all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence were strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid
wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril,
stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well
represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical
development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of
natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been
ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into
the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in
which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political
life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question--it offered
inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even
political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the
grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he
kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as
at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest
ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed,
his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and
imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration
of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of
earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that
swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural
activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon
to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing,
of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble
frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting
it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown
morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which
they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many
more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless
that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her
reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,
sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known
each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with
the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable
in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the
clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,
that she could scarcely forgive him,--least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer! --for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their
mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,
fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.
When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face.
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook? "
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl! " whispered her mother. "We must
not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the
forest. "
"I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," continued
the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me be gone? "
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him! "
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities--or insanity, as we
should term it--led her to do what few of the towns-people would have
ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet
letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great
magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of
rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the
procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently
cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in
all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in
conjunction with Hester Prynne,--kindly as so many now felt towards
the latter,--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled, and
caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which
the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it! " whispered the old
lady, confidentially, to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he
really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would
think how little while it is since he went forth out of his
study,--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I
warrant,--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that
means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe
him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the
music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was
fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard
changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the
world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path? "
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister
of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale! "
"Fie, woman, fie! " cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the
wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it
in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou
wearest it openly; so there need be no question about that. But this
minister! Let me tell thee, in thine ear!
