No More Learning

" said they among themselves. "The saint on
earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what
horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine! " The minister well
knew--subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was! --the light in
which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a
cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but
had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without
the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very
truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the
constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie,
as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his
miserable self!

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

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

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

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

XII.

THE MINISTER'S VIGIL.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Minister! " whispered little Pearl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And what other time? " persisted the child.

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

Pearl laughed again.

[Illustration: "They stood in the noon of that strange splendor"]

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

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

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

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

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

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

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

XIII.

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER.


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

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

[Illustration: Hester in the House of Mourning]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

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

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

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

XIV.

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN.


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

Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician.

"I would speak a word with you," said she,--"a word that concerns us
much. "

"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth? " answered he, raising himself from his stooping
posture. "With all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you
on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and
godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and
whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the
council.