There were many people present, from the country round
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes.
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes.
Hawthorne - Scarlett Letter
Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine
mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque
and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of
this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation,
but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our
forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of
magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the
statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's
eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a
government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece
and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks
of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with
jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their
appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been
sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,
the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but
widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had
witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the
village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive
on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were
essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions of
Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the
market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at
quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the
platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of
defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.
But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was
broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of
one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then
in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare
favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even
at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to
learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint
was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their
savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,
red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow
and stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible
gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild
as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They
were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the
waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even
in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and
quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around
them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,
rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,
not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds
on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be
arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for
instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens
of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the
wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his
reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan
elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned
hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of
these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a
profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which
was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.
There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,
by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this
face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without
undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring
fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to
the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach
the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,
and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed
itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the
scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,
and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered
a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together
without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's
repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for
rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result
of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or
ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other
doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as
there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a
Spanish vessel. "
"What mean you? " inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger? "
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare
with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of
your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that
is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers! "
[Illustration: Chillingworth,--"Smile with a sinister meaning"]
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together. "
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at
that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in
the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile
which--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk
and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
[Illustration]
XXII.
THE PROCESSION.
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where,
in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since
observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.
[Illustration: New England Worthies]
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately
march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps
imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill;
but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and
clarion addresses itself to the multitude,--that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an
instant, the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed
to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and
swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the
shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armor of the
military company, which followed after the music, and formed the
honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with
an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of
martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms,
where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member
of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low
Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won
their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire
array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding
over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age
when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the
quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at
all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the
English settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and
all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence were strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid
wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril,
stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well
represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical
development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of
natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been
ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into
the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in
which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political
life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question--it offered
inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even
political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the
grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he
kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as
at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest
ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed,
his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and
imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration
of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of
earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that
swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural
activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon
to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing,
of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble
frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting
it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown
morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which
they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many
more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless
that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her
reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,
sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known
each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with
the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable
in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the
clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,
that she could scarcely forgive him,--least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer! --for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their
mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,
fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.
When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face.
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook? "
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl! " whispered her mother. "We must
not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the
forest. "
"I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," continued
the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me be gone? "
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him! "
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities--or insanity, as we
should term it--led her to do what few of the towns-people would have
ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet
letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great
magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of
rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the
procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently
cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in
all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in
conjunction with Hester Prynne,--kindly as so many now felt towards
the latter,--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled, and
caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which
the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it! " whispered the old
lady, confidentially, to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he
really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would
think how little while it is since he went forth out of his
study,--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I
warrant,--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that
means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe
him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the
music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was
fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard
changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the
world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path? "
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister
of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale! "
"Fie, woman, fie! " cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the
wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it
in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou
wearest it openly; so there need be no question about that. But this
minister! Let me tell thee, in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one
of his own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond
as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters
so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of
all the world! What is it that the minister seeks to hide, with his
hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne! "
"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins? " eagerly asked little Pearl. "Hast
thou seen it? "
"No matter, darling! " responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another.
They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of the Air!
Wilt thou ride with me, some fine night, to see thy father? Then thou
shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart! "
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were
heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester
near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit
another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of
the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon
to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct, but varied, murmur and
flow of the minister's very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher
spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and
cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart,
wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the
church-walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and
sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning
for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These,
perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser
medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low
undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended
with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and
power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of
awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes
became, there was forever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish,--the whisper, or
the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that
touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of
pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a
desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and
commanding,--when it gushed irrepressibly upward,--when it assumed its
utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its
way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open
air,--still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he
could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a
human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret,
whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching
its sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and
never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave
the clergyman his most appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would
nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence
she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense
within her,--too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing
heavily on her mind,--that her whole orb of life, both before and
after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave
it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre
crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of
bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage, by darting
to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the
clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but, oftentimes, a sharp and
irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit,
which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tiptoe dance, because it
was played upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever
Pearl saw anything to excite her ever-active and wandering curiosity,
she flew thitherward and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it; but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in requital.
The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less
inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the
indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her
little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the
wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than
his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as
characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the
swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the
land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a
flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were
gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in
the night-time.
One of these seafaring men--the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to
Hester Prynne--was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted
to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as
impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took
from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to
the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist,
with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her,
and it was difficult to imagine her without it.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the seaman.
"Wilt thou carry her a message from me? "
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump-shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring
his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy
mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her
this, thou witch-baby? "
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air! " cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill name, I
shall tell him of thee; and he will chase thy ship with a tempest! "
Pursuing a zigzag course across the market-place, the child returned
to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's
strong, calm, steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom,
which--at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister
and herself out of their labyrinth of misery--showed itself, with an
unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial.
There were many people present, from the country round
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after
exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne
with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however,
it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At
that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole
gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and
learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their
sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians
were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity,
and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes
on Hester's bosom; conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this
brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high
dignity among her people. Lastly the inhabitants of the town (their
own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same
quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest,
with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester
saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who
had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door, seven years ago; all
save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose
burial-robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so
soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the
centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her
breast more painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it
on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning
cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her forever, the
admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an
audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The
sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the
market-place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to
surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXIII.
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER.
The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had
been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came
to a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should
follow the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed
tumult; as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had
transported them into the region of another's mind, were returning
into themselves, with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In
a moment more, the crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the
church. Now that there was an end, they needed other breath, more fit
to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than
that atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame,
and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.
In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the
market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of
the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one
another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear. According
to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so high,
and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had inspiration
ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through
his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and
possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written
discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that must
have been as marvellous to himself as to his audience. His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities
of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they
were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the
close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to
its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of Israel were
constrained; only with this difference, that, whereas the Jewish seers
had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission
to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people
of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the whole discourse,
there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could
not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so loved
them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh--had the
foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave them in
their tears! This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the last
emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced; it was as if
an angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright wings
over the people for an instant,--at once a shadow and a
splendor,--and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most men,
in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it
far behind them--an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph
than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood,
at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which
the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a
reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New
England's earliest days, when the professional character was of itself
a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied,
as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the
close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing
beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still
burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clangor of the music, and the measured tramp
of the military escort, issuing from the church-door. The procession
was to be marshalled thence to the town-hall, where a solemn banquet
would complete the ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers was
seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back
reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old
and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and
renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in
the market-place, their presence was greeted by a shout. This--though
doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the
childlike loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be
an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by
that high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their
ears. Each felt the impulse in himself, and, in the same breath,
caught it from his neighbor. Within the church, it had hardly been
kept down; beneath the sky, it pealed upward to the zenith. There were
human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious
feeling, to produce that more impressive sound than the organ tones of
the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty
swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal
impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never,
from the soil of New England, had gone up such a shout! Never, on New
England soil, had stood the man so honored by his mortal brethren as
the preacher!
How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles of
a halo in the air about his head? So etherealized by spirit as he was,
and so apotheosized by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the
procession, really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes
were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach
among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd
after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he
looked, amid all his triumph! The energy--or say, rather, the
inspiration which had held him up, until he should have delivered the
sacred message that brought its own strength along with it from
heaven--was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its
office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly
among the late-decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man
alive, with such a death-like hue; it was hardly a man with life in
him, that tottered on his path so nervelessly, yet tottered, and did
not fall!
One of his clerical brethren,--it was the venerable John
Wilson,--observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the
retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to
offer his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled
the old man's arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be
so described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant,
with its mother's arms in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And
now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he
had come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester
Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood
Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet
letter on her breast! The minister here made a pause; although the
music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the
procession moved. It summoned him onward,--onward to the
festival! --but here he made a pause.
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon
him. He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give
assistance; judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's aspect, that he must
otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter's
expression that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily
obeying the vague intimations that pass from one spirit to another.
The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly
faintness was, in their view, only another phase of the minister's
celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be
wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing
dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven.
He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.
"Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl! "
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child,
with the bird-like motion which was one of her characteristics, flew
to him, and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne--slowly,
as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest
will--likewise drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this
instant, old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the
crowd,--or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil, was his look, he
rose up out of some nether region,--to snatch back his victim from
what he sought to do! Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward,
and caught the minister by the arm.
"Madman, hold! what is your purpose? " whispered he. "Wave back that
woman! Cast off this child! All shall be well! Do not blacken your
fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you bring
infamy on your sacred profession? "
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late! " answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what it
was! With God's help, I shall escape thee now! "
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name
of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last
moment, to do what--for my own heavy sin and miserable agony--I
withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine
thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by
the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man
is opposing it with all his might! --with all his own might, and the
fiend's! Come, Hester, come! Support me up yonder scaffold! "
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more
immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so
perplexed as to the purport of what they saw,--unable to receive the
explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any
other,--that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the
judgment which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the
minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm
around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still
the little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of
guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled,
therefore, to be present at its closing scene.
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly at
the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret,--no high place nor
lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,--save on this very
scaffold! "
"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither! " answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester with an expression of doubt and
anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a
feeble smile upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the
forest? "
"I know not! I know not! " she hurriedly replied. "Better? Yea; so we
may both die, and little Pearl die with us! "
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister;
"and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which he hath made plain
before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste
to take my shame upon me! "
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little
Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and
venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the
people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing
with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep life-matter--which,
if full of sin, was full of anguish and repentance likewise--was now
to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone
down upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he
stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar
of Eternal Justice.
"People of New England! " cried he, with a voice that rose over them,
high, solemn, and majestic,--yet had always a tremor through it, and
sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse
and woe,--"ye, that have loved me! --ye, that have deemed me
holy! --behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last! --at
last! --I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have
stood; here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength
wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me, at this dreadful
moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter
which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk
hath been,--wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped to
find repose,--it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of you,
at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered! "
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder
of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily
weakness,--and, still more, the faintness of heart,--that was striving
for the mastery with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped
passionately forward a pace before the woman and the child.
"It was on him! " he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so
determined was he to speak out the whole. "God's eye beheld it! The
angels were forever pointing at it! The Devil knew it well, and
fretted it continually with the touch of his burning finger! But he
hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a
spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world! --and sad, because
he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up
before you! He bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He
tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow
of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red
stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!
Stand any here that question God's judgment on a sinner? Behold!
Behold a dreadful witness of it! "
[Illustration: "Shall we not meet again? "]
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe
that revelation. For an instant, the gaze of the horror-stricken
multitude was concentred on the ghastly miracle; while the minister
stood, with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the
crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the
scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her
bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank,
dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.
"Thou hast escaped me! " he repeated more than once. "Thou hast escaped
me! "
"May God forgive thee! " said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply
sinned! "
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the
woman and the child.
"My little Pearl," said he, feebly,--and there was a sweet and gentle
smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now
that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be
sportive with the child,--"dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now?
Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt? "
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief,
in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her
sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were
the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor
forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her
mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all
fulfilled.
"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell! "
"Shall we not meet again? " whispered she, bending her face down close
to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely,
surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest
far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what
thou seest? "
"Hush, Hester, hush! " said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we
broke! --the sin here so awfully revealed! --let these alone be in thy
thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our
God,--when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it
was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an
everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath
proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this
burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and
terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing
me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people!
Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever!
Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell! "
That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The
multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe
and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur
that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their
thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one
account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the
unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there
were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been
conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr.
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine
mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque
and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of
this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation,
but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our
forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of
magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the
statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's
eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a
government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece
and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks
of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with
jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their
appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been
sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,
the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but
widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had
witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the
village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive
on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were
essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions of
Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the
market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at
quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the
platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of
defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.
But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was
broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of
one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then
in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare
favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even
at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to
learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint
was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their
savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,
red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow
and stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible
gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild
as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They
were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the
waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even
in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and
quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around
them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,
rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,
not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds
on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be
arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for
instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens
of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the
wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his
reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan
elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned
hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of
these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a
profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, which
was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.
There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,
by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this
face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without
undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring
fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to
the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach
the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,
and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed
itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the
scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,
and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered
a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together
without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's
repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for
rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result
of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or
ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other
doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as
there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a
Spanish vessel. "
"What mean you? " inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger? "
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare
with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of
your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that
is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers! "
[Illustration: Chillingworth,--"Smile with a sinister meaning"]
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together. "
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at
that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in
the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile
which--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk
and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
[Illustration]
XXII.
THE PROCESSION.
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where,
in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since
observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.
[Illustration: New England Worthies]
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately
march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps
imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill;
but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and
clarion addresses itself to the multitude,--that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an
instant, the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed
to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and
swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the
shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armor of the
military company, which followed after the music, and formed the
honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with
an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of
martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms,
where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member
of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low
Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won
their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire
array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding
over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age
when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the
quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at
all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the
English settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and
all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence were strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid
wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril,
stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well
represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical
development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of
natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been
ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into
the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in
which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political
life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question--it offered
inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even
political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the
grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he
kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as
at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest
ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed,
his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and
imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration
of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of
earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that
swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural
activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon
to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing,
of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble
frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting
it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown
morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which
they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many
more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless
that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her
reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,
sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known
each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with
the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable
in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the
clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,
that she could scarcely forgive him,--least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer! --for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their
mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,
fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.
When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face.
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook? "
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl! " whispered her mother. "We must
not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the
forest. "
"I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," continued
the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me be gone? "
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him! "
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities--or insanity, as we
should term it--led her to do what few of the towns-people would have
ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet
letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great
magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of
rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the
procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently
cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in
all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in
conjunction with Hester Prynne,--kindly as so many now felt towards
the latter,--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled, and
caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which
the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it! " whispered the old
lady, confidentially, to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he
really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would
think how little while it is since he went forth out of his
study,--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I
warrant,--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that
means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe
him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the
music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was
fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard
changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the
world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path? "
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister
of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale! "
"Fie, woman, fie! " cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the
wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it
in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou
wearest it openly; so there need be no question about that. But this
minister! Let me tell thee, in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one
of his own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond
as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters
so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of
all the world! What is it that the minister seeks to hide, with his
hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne! "
"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins? " eagerly asked little Pearl. "Hast
thou seen it? "
"No matter, darling! " responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another.
They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of the Air!
Wilt thou ride with me, some fine night, to see thy father? Then thou
shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart! "
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were
heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester
near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit
another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of
the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon
to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct, but varied, murmur and
flow of the minister's very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher
spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and
cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart,
wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the
church-walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and
sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning
for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These,
perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser
medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low
undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended
with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and
power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of
awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes
became, there was forever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish,--the whisper, or
the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that
touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of
pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a
desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and
commanding,--when it gushed irrepressibly upward,--when it assumed its
utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its
way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open
air,--still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he
could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a
human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret,
whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching
its sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and
never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave
the clergyman his most appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would
nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence
she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense
within her,--too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing
heavily on her mind,--that her whole orb of life, both before and
after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave
it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre
crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of
bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage, by darting
to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the
clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but, oftentimes, a sharp and
irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit,
which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tiptoe dance, because it
was played upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever
Pearl saw anything to excite her ever-active and wandering curiosity,
she flew thitherward and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it; but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in requital.
The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less
inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the
indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her
little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the
wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than
his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as
characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the
swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the
land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a
flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were
gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in
the night-time.
One of these seafaring men--the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to
Hester Prynne--was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted
to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as
impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took
from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to
the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist,
with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her,
and it was difficult to imagine her without it.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the seaman.
"Wilt thou carry her a message from me? "
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump-shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring
his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy
mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her
this, thou witch-baby? "
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air! " cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill name, I
shall tell him of thee; and he will chase thy ship with a tempest! "
Pursuing a zigzag course across the market-place, the child returned
to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's
strong, calm, steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom,
which--at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister
and herself out of their labyrinth of misery--showed itself, with an
unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial.
There were many people present, from the country round
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after
exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne
with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however,
it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At
that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole
gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and
learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their
sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians
were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity,
and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes
on Hester's bosom; conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this
brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high
dignity among her people. Lastly the inhabitants of the town (their
own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same
quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest,
with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester
saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who
had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door, seven years ago; all
save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose
burial-robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so
soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the
centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her
breast more painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it
on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning
cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her forever, the
admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an
audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The
sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the
market-place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to
surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXIII.
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER.
The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had
been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came
to a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should
follow the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed
tumult; as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had
transported them into the region of another's mind, were returning
into themselves, with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In
a moment more, the crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the
church. Now that there was an end, they needed other breath, more fit
to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than
that atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame,
and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.
In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the
market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of
the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one
another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear. According
to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so high,
and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had inspiration
ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through
his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and
possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written
discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that must
have been as marvellous to himself as to his audience. His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities
of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they
were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the
close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to
its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of Israel were
constrained; only with this difference, that, whereas the Jewish seers
had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission
to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people
of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the whole discourse,
there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could
not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so loved
them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh--had the
foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave them in
their tears! This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the last
emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced; it was as if
an angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright wings
over the people for an instant,--at once a shadow and a
splendor,--and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most men,
in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it
far behind them--an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph
than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood,
at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which
the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a
reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New
England's earliest days, when the professional character was of itself
a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied,
as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the
close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing
beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still
burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clangor of the music, and the measured tramp
of the military escort, issuing from the church-door. The procession
was to be marshalled thence to the town-hall, where a solemn banquet
would complete the ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers was
seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back
reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old
and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and
renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in
the market-place, their presence was greeted by a shout. This--though
doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the
childlike loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be
an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by
that high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their
ears. Each felt the impulse in himself, and, in the same breath,
caught it from his neighbor. Within the church, it had hardly been
kept down; beneath the sky, it pealed upward to the zenith. There were
human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious
feeling, to produce that more impressive sound than the organ tones of
the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty
swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal
impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never,
from the soil of New England, had gone up such a shout! Never, on New
England soil, had stood the man so honored by his mortal brethren as
the preacher!
How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles of
a halo in the air about his head? So etherealized by spirit as he was,
and so apotheosized by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the
procession, really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes
were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach
among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd
after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he
looked, amid all his triumph! The energy--or say, rather, the
inspiration which had held him up, until he should have delivered the
sacred message that brought its own strength along with it from
heaven--was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its
office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly
among the late-decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man
alive, with such a death-like hue; it was hardly a man with life in
him, that tottered on his path so nervelessly, yet tottered, and did
not fall!
One of his clerical brethren,--it was the venerable John
Wilson,--observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the
retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to
offer his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled
the old man's arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be
so described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant,
with its mother's arms in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And
now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he
had come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester
Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood
Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet
letter on her breast! The minister here made a pause; although the
music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the
procession moved. It summoned him onward,--onward to the
festival! --but here he made a pause.
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon
him. He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give
assistance; judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's aspect, that he must
otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter's
expression that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily
obeying the vague intimations that pass from one spirit to another.
The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly
faintness was, in their view, only another phase of the minister's
celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be
wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing
dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven.
He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.
"Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl! "
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child,
with the bird-like motion which was one of her characteristics, flew
to him, and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne--slowly,
as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest
will--likewise drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this
instant, old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the
crowd,--or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil, was his look, he
rose up out of some nether region,--to snatch back his victim from
what he sought to do! Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward,
and caught the minister by the arm.
"Madman, hold! what is your purpose? " whispered he. "Wave back that
woman! Cast off this child! All shall be well! Do not blacken your
fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you bring
infamy on your sacred profession? "
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late! " answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what it
was! With God's help, I shall escape thee now! "
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name
of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last
moment, to do what--for my own heavy sin and miserable agony--I
withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine
thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by
the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man
is opposing it with all his might! --with all his own might, and the
fiend's! Come, Hester, come! Support me up yonder scaffold! "
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more
immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so
perplexed as to the purport of what they saw,--unable to receive the
explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any
other,--that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the
judgment which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the
minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm
around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still
the little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of
guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled,
therefore, to be present at its closing scene.
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly at
the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret,--no high place nor
lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,--save on this very
scaffold! "
"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither! " answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester with an expression of doubt and
anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a
feeble smile upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the
forest? "
"I know not! I know not! " she hurriedly replied. "Better? Yea; so we
may both die, and little Pearl die with us! "
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister;
"and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which he hath made plain
before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste
to take my shame upon me! "
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little
Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and
venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the
people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing
with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep life-matter--which,
if full of sin, was full of anguish and repentance likewise--was now
to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone
down upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he
stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar
of Eternal Justice.
"People of New England! " cried he, with a voice that rose over them,
high, solemn, and majestic,--yet had always a tremor through it, and
sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse
and woe,--"ye, that have loved me! --ye, that have deemed me
holy! --behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last! --at
last! --I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have
stood; here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength
wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me, at this dreadful
moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter
which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk
hath been,--wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped to
find repose,--it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of you,
at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered! "
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder
of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily
weakness,--and, still more, the faintness of heart,--that was striving
for the mastery with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped
passionately forward a pace before the woman and the child.
"It was on him! " he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so
determined was he to speak out the whole. "God's eye beheld it! The
angels were forever pointing at it! The Devil knew it well, and
fretted it continually with the touch of his burning finger! But he
hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a
spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world! --and sad, because
he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up
before you! He bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He
tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow
of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red
stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!
Stand any here that question God's judgment on a sinner? Behold!
Behold a dreadful witness of it! "
[Illustration: "Shall we not meet again? "]
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe
that revelation. For an instant, the gaze of the horror-stricken
multitude was concentred on the ghastly miracle; while the minister
stood, with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the
crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the
scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her
bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank,
dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.
"Thou hast escaped me! " he repeated more than once. "Thou hast escaped
me! "
"May God forgive thee! " said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply
sinned! "
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the
woman and the child.
"My little Pearl," said he, feebly,--and there was a sweet and gentle
smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now
that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be
sportive with the child,--"dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now?
Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt? "
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief,
in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her
sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were
the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor
forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her
mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all
fulfilled.
"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell! "
"Shall we not meet again? " whispered she, bending her face down close
to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely,
surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest
far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what
thou seest? "
"Hush, Hester, hush! " said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we
broke! --the sin here so awfully revealed! --let these alone be in thy
thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our
God,--when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it
was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an
everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath
proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this
burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and
terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing
me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people!
Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever!
Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell! "
That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The
multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe
and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur
that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their
thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one
account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the
unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there
were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been
conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr.
