As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting
of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting
of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Hawthorne - Scarlett Letter
--all death!
"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his
words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to
interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke.
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with whom
to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it! "--Again she
hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort. --"Thou hast long
had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof! "
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at
his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
"Ha! What sayest thou! " cried he. "An enemy! And under mine own roof!
What mean you? "
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she
was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so
many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose
purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of
his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was
enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as
Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive
to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his
vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and
invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not,
that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,--the secret poison
of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,--and his authorized
interference, as a physician, with the minister's physical and
spiritual infirmities,--that these bad opportunities had been turned
to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to
cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual
being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and
hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which
madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,--nay, why
should we not speak it? --still so passionately loved! Hester felt that
the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she
had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely
preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to
choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess,
she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died there,
at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
"O Arthur," cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have striven
to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and
did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good,--thy
life,--thy fame,--were put in question! Then I consented to a
deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the
other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man! --the
physician! --he whom they call Roger Chillingworth! --he was my
husband! "
[Illustration: "Wilt thou yet forgive me? "]
The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which--intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher,
purer, softer qualities--was, in fact, the portion of him which the
Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was
there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For
the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his
character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its
lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he. "I did know it! Was not the
secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight
of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not
understand? O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the
horror of this thing! And the shame! --the indelicacy! --the horrible
ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye
that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!
I cannot forgive thee! "
"Thou shalt forgive me! " cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen
leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive! "
With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him,
and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek
rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but
strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should
look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her,--for
seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,--and still she
bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven,
likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of
this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear and live!
"Wilt thou yet forgive me? " she repeated, over and over again. "Wilt
thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive? "
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister, at length, with a
deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely
forgive you now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the
worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted
priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has
violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I,
Hester, never did so! "
"Never, never! " whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its
own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it? "
"Hush, Hester! " said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I
have not forgotten! "
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the
mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier
hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending,
and darkening ever, as it stole along;--and yet it enclosed a charm
that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and,
after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and
creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were
tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned
dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat
beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led
backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the
burden of her ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his
good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had
ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen
only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of
the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale,
false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester," cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows
your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to
keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge? "
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of
his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He
will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion. "
"And I! --how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this
deadly enemy? " exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself,
and pressing his hand nervously against his heart,--a gesture that had
grown involuntary with him.
"Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me! "
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and
firmly. "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye! "
"It were far worse than death! " replied the minister. "But how to
avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these
withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he
was? Must I sink down there, and die at once? "
"Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee! " said Hester, with the tears
gushing into her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no
other cause! "
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with! "
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it. "
"Be thou strong for me! " answered he. "Advise me what to do. "
"Is the world, then, so narrow? " exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her
deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic
power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold
itself erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder
town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as
lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward
to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too. Deeper it goes,
and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every
step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no
vestige of the white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a
journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most
wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade
enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth? "
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves! " replied the minister,
with a sad smile.
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea! " continued Hester. "It
brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again.
In our native land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast
London,--or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy,--thou
wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do
with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better
part in bondage too long already! "
"It cannot be! " answered the minister, listening as if he were called
upon to realize a dream. "I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinful as
I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly
existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my
own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare
not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is
death and dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an end! "
"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery," replied
Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But
thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as
thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the
ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and
ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all
anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one
trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is
happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false
life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a
mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,--as is more thy
nature,--be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most
renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything,
save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and
make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without
fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the
torments that have so gnawed into thy life! --that have made thee
feeble to will and to do! --that will leave thee powerless even to
repent! Up, and away! "
"O Hester! " cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,
kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of
running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must
die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture
into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone! "
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He
lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his
reach.
He repeated the word.
"Alone, Hester! "
"Thou shalt not go alone! " answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVIII.
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for
so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the
untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a
colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely
as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from
this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever
priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared
not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,--stern and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but
taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one
of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had
watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,--for those it
was easy to arrange,--but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that
day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its
principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his
order inevitably hemmed him in.
As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting
of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven
years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation
for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more
to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None;
unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and
exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the
very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed
criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard
to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,
finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,
sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom
which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken,
that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is
never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded;
so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and
might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in
preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still
the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that
would win over again his unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it
suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If, in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that
earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now,--since I am irrevocably
doomed,--wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the
condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a
better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,--so tender to soothe! O
Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me! "
"Thou wilt go! " said Hester, calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of
his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it
were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than
throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth.
Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the
devotional in his mood.
"Do I feel joy again? " cried he, wondering at himself. "Methought the
germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem
to have flung myself--sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened--down
upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with
new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the
better life! Why did we not find it sooner? "
"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo
it all, and make it as it had never been! "
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter,
and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the
withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the
stream. With a hand's breadth farther flight it would have fallen into
the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry
onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring
about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost
jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.
[Illustration: A Gleam of Sunshine]
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden
of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She
had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By another
impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down
it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a
light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her
beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and
clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before
unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of
the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal
hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden
smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into
the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn
trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the
brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a
mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the
outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been
bright in Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy.
"Thou must know Pearl! " said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen
her,--yes, I know it! --but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She
is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her
dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her. "
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me? " asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust,--a backwardness to be familiar
with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl! "
"Ah, that was sad! " answered the mother. "But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl!
Pearl! "
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in
a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook.
So thou thinkest the child will love me? "
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of
boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or
distinct,--now like a real child, now like a child's spirit,--as the
splendor went and came again. She heard her mother's voice, and
approached slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, while her mother sat
talking with the clergyman. The great black forest--stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into
its bosom--became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it
knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to
welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the
preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as
drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was
pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness
hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented
of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A
pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and
uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the
lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or
merriment,--for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little
personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,--so he
chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a
last year's nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox,
startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked
inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal
off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,--but here
the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,--came up, and smelt of
Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.
The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild
things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the
human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The flowers appeared to know
it; and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn thyself with
me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me! "--and, to please
them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and
some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before
her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and
became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in
closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.
Slowly; for she saw the clergyman.
[Illustration]
XIX.
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE.
"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the
minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her
beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple
flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies,
in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid
child! But I know whose brow she has! "
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet
smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath
caused me many an alarm? Methought--O Hester, what a thought is that,
and how terrible to dread it! --that my own features were partly
repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them!
But she is mostly thine! "
"No, no! Not mostly! " answered the mother, with a tender smile. "A
little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child
she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those
wild-flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left
in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us. "
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her
was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the
world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which
was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,--all written in
this symbol,--all plainly manifest,--had there been a prophet or
magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the
oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could
they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were
conjoined, when they beheld at once the material union, and the
spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally
together? Thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which they
did not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child, as she
came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange--no passion nor eagerness--in thy way of
accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic
little elf, sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant of emotion,
when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the
child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee! "
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at Hester
Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But,
in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be
familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear,
nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even
little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl,
twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first
time,--thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with
thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor. "
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine! " answered the
mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She
may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee! "
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on
the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who
still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her.
Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth
and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with
all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of
flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than
the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl
stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the
forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of
sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In
the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with
likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the
child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the
sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since
the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted
within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect
of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her
wonted place, and hardly knew where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never
meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends
of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream?
Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my
nerves. "
"Come, dearest child! " said Hester, encouragingly, and stretching out
both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish
before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also.
Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as thy mother alone
could give thee! Leap across the brook, and come to us. Thou canst
leap like a young deer! "
[Illustration: The Child at the Brook-Side]
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed
her bright, wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now
included them both in the same glance; as if to detect and explain to
herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some
unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon
himself, his hand--with that gesture so habitual as to have become
involuntary--stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air
of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger
extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother's breast. And
beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and
sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
"Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me? " exclaimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered on her
brow; the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like
aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept
beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of
unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet more
imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic
beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and
imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee! " cried Hester Prynne,
who, however inured to such behavior on the elf-child's part at other
seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. "Leap
across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to
thee! "
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats, any more than
mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most
extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with
piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that,
alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as
if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and
encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath of
Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its
foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's bosom!
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and
turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and
annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the
accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl
misses something which she has always seen me wear! "
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath
of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to
smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this
passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch,
it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me! "
Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy
sigh; while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a
deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she, sadly, "look down at thy feet! There! --before
thee! --on the hither side of the brook! "
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there lay the
scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream, that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither! " said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up! " answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child! " observed Hester, aside to the minister. "O, I
have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as
regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little
longer,--only a few days longer,--until we shall have left this
region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of.
The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand,
and swallow it up forever! "
With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the
scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a
moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there
was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back
this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into
infinite space! --she had drawn an hour's free breath!
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his
words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to
interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke.
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with whom
to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it! "--Again she
hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort. --"Thou hast long
had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof! "
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at
his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
"Ha! What sayest thou! " cried he. "An enemy! And under mine own roof!
What mean you? "
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she
was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so
many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose
purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of
his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was
enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as
Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive
to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his
vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and
invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not,
that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,--the secret poison
of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,--and his authorized
interference, as a physician, with the minister's physical and
spiritual infirmities,--that these bad opportunities had been turned
to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to
cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual
being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and
hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which
madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,--nay, why
should we not speak it? --still so passionately loved! Hester felt that
the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she
had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely
preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to
choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess,
she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died there,
at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
"O Arthur," cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have striven
to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and
did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good,--thy
life,--thy fame,--were put in question! Then I consented to a
deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the
other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man! --the
physician! --he whom they call Roger Chillingworth! --he was my
husband! "
[Illustration: "Wilt thou yet forgive me? "]
The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which--intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher,
purer, softer qualities--was, in fact, the portion of him which the
Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was
there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For
the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his
character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its
lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he. "I did know it! Was not the
secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight
of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not
understand? O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the
horror of this thing! And the shame! --the indelicacy! --the horrible
ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye
that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!
I cannot forgive thee! "
"Thou shalt forgive me! " cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen
leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive! "
With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him,
and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek
rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but
strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should
look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her,--for
seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,--and still she
bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven,
likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of
this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear and live!
"Wilt thou yet forgive me? " she repeated, over and over again. "Wilt
thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive? "
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister, at length, with a
deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely
forgive you now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the
worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted
priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has
violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I,
Hester, never did so! "
"Never, never! " whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its
own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it? "
"Hush, Hester! " said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I
have not forgotten! "
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the
mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier
hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending,
and darkening ever, as it stole along;--and yet it enclosed a charm
that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and,
after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and
creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were
tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned
dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat
beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led
backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the
burden of her ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his
good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had
ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen
only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of
the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale,
false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester," cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows
your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to
keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge? "
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of
his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He
will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion. "
"And I! --how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this
deadly enemy? " exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself,
and pressing his hand nervously against his heart,--a gesture that had
grown involuntary with him.
"Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me! "
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and
firmly. "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye! "
"It were far worse than death! " replied the minister. "But how to
avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these
withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he
was? Must I sink down there, and die at once? "
"Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee! " said Hester, with the tears
gushing into her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no
other cause! "
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with! "
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it. "
"Be thou strong for me! " answered he. "Advise me what to do. "
"Is the world, then, so narrow? " exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her
deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic
power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold
itself erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder
town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as
lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward
to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too. Deeper it goes,
and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every
step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no
vestige of the white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a
journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most
wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade
enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth? "
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves! " replied the minister,
with a sad smile.
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea! " continued Hester. "It
brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again.
In our native land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast
London,--or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy,--thou
wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do
with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better
part in bondage too long already! "
"It cannot be! " answered the minister, listening as if he were called
upon to realize a dream. "I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinful as
I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly
existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my
own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare
not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is
death and dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an end! "
"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery," replied
Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But
thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as
thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the
ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and
ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all
anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one
trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is
happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false
life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a
mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,--as is more thy
nature,--be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most
renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything,
save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and
make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without
fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the
torments that have so gnawed into thy life! --that have made thee
feeble to will and to do! --that will leave thee powerless even to
repent! Up, and away! "
"O Hester! " cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,
kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of
running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must
die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture
into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone! "
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He
lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his
reach.
He repeated the word.
"Alone, Hester! "
"Thou shalt not go alone! " answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVIII.
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for
so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the
untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a
colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely
as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from
this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever
priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared
not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,--stern and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but
taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one
of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had
watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,--for those it
was easy to arrange,--but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that
day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its
principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his
order inevitably hemmed him in.
As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting
of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven
years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation
for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more
to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None;
unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and
exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the
very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed
criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard
to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,
finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,
sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom
which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken,
that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is
never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded;
so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and
might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in
preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still
the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that
would win over again his unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it
suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If, in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that
earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now,--since I am irrevocably
doomed,--wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the
condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a
better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,--so tender to soothe! O
Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me! "
"Thou wilt go! " said Hester, calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of
his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it
were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than
throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth.
Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the
devotional in his mood.
"Do I feel joy again? " cried he, wondering at himself. "Methought the
germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem
to have flung myself--sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened--down
upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with
new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the
better life! Why did we not find it sooner? "
"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo
it all, and make it as it had never been! "
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter,
and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the
withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the
stream. With a hand's breadth farther flight it would have fallen into
the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry
onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring
about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost
jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.
[Illustration: A Gleam of Sunshine]
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden
of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She
had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By another
impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down
it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a
light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her
beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and
clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before
unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of
the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal
hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden
smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into
the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn
trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the
brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a
mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the
outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been
bright in Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy.
"Thou must know Pearl! " said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen
her,--yes, I know it! --but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She
is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her
dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her. "
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me? " asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust,--a backwardness to be familiar
with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl! "
"Ah, that was sad! " answered the mother. "But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl!
Pearl! "
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in
a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook.
So thou thinkest the child will love me? "
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of
boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or
distinct,--now like a real child, now like a child's spirit,--as the
splendor went and came again. She heard her mother's voice, and
approached slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, while her mother sat
talking with the clergyman. The great black forest--stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into
its bosom--became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it
knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to
welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the
preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as
drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was
pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness
hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented
of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A
pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and
uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the
lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or
merriment,--for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little
personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,--so he
chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a
last year's nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox,
startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked
inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal
off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,--but here
the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,--came up, and smelt of
Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.
The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild
things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the
human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The flowers appeared to know
it; and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn thyself with
me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me! "--and, to please
them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and
some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before
her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and
became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in
closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.
Slowly; for she saw the clergyman.
[Illustration]
XIX.
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE.
"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the
minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her
beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple
flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies,
in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid
child! But I know whose brow she has! "
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet
smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath
caused me many an alarm? Methought--O Hester, what a thought is that,
and how terrible to dread it! --that my own features were partly
repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them!
But she is mostly thine! "
"No, no! Not mostly! " answered the mother, with a tender smile. "A
little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child
she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those
wild-flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left
in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us. "
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her
was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the
world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which
was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,--all written in
this symbol,--all plainly manifest,--had there been a prophet or
magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the
oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could
they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were
conjoined, when they beheld at once the material union, and the
spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally
together? Thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which they
did not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child, as she
came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange--no passion nor eagerness--in thy way of
accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic
little elf, sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant of emotion,
when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the
child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee! "
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at Hester
Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But,
in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be
familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear,
nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even
little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl,
twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first
time,--thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with
thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor. "
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine! " answered the
mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She
may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee! "
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on
the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who
still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her.
Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth
and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with
all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of
flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than
the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl
stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the
forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of
sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In
the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with
likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the
child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the
sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since
the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted
within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect
of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her
wonted place, and hardly knew where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never
meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends
of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream?
Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my
nerves. "
"Come, dearest child! " said Hester, encouragingly, and stretching out
both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish
before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also.
Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as thy mother alone
could give thee! Leap across the brook, and come to us. Thou canst
leap like a young deer! "
[Illustration: The Child at the Brook-Side]
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed
her bright, wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now
included them both in the same glance; as if to detect and explain to
herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some
unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon
himself, his hand--with that gesture so habitual as to have become
involuntary--stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air
of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger
extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother's breast. And
beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and
sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
"Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me? " exclaimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered on her
brow; the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like
aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept
beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of
unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet more
imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic
beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and
imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee! " cried Hester Prynne,
who, however inured to such behavior on the elf-child's part at other
seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. "Leap
across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to
thee! "
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats, any more than
mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most
extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with
piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that,
alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as
if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and
encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath of
Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its
foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's bosom!
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and
turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and
annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the
accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl
misses something which she has always seen me wear! "
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath
of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to
smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this
passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch,
it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me! "
Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy
sigh; while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a
deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she, sadly, "look down at thy feet! There! --before
thee! --on the hither side of the brook! "
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there lay the
scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream, that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither! " said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up! " answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child! " observed Hester, aside to the minister. "O, I
have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as
regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little
longer,--only a few days longer,--until we shall have left this
region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of.
The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand,
and swallow it up forever! "
With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the
scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a
moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there
was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back
this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into
infinite space! --she had drawn an hour's free breath!
