“No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr. Dimmesdale,

passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of

fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. “Not to thee! But, if it be the

soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the

soul! He, if it stand with His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill.

Let Him do with me as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good.

But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust

himself between the sufferer and his God?”

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to

himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile. “There is

nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion

takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one

passion so with another. He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious

Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart.”

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two

companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore.

The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that

the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of

temper, which there had been nothing in the physician’s words to excuse

or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had

thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which

it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly

sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the

amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care

which, if not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all

probability, been the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that

hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his

medical supervision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all

good faith, but always quitting the patient’s apartment, at the close

of the professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon

his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale’s presence,

but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.

“A rare case,” he muttered. “I must needs look deeper into it. A

strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art’s

sake, I must search this matter to the bottom.”

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the

Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into a

deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter

volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast

ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of

the minister’s repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one

of those persons whose sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as

easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an

unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself

that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without

any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician

advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his

bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that hitherto had always covered

it even from the professional eye.

Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.

After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a

ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye

and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness

of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the

extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the

ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger

Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need

to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to

heaven, and won into his kingdom.

But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the

trait of wonder in it!

XI.

THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the

clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of

another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger

Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not,

indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread.

Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a

quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this

unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge

than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one

trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,

the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful

thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the

world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed

to him, the Pitiless—to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to

be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately

pay the debt of vengeance!

The clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme. Roger

Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less

satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence—using the

avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning,

where it seemed most to punish—had substituted for his black devices. A

revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered

little for his object, whether celestial or from what other region. By

its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.

Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul

of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he

could see and comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth,

not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the poor minister’s interior

world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a

throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to

know the spring that controlled the engine: and the physician knew it

well. Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a

magician’s wand, up rose a grisly phantom—up rose a thousand

phantoms—in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking

round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his

breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the

minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil

influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual

nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully—even, at times, with

horror and the bitterness of hatred—at the deformed figure of the old

physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest

and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were

odious in the clergyman’s sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of

a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to

acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason

for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the

poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s entire substance,

attributed all his presentiments to no other cause. He took himself to

task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth,

disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his

best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a

matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with

the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting

the purpose to which—poor forlorn creature that he was, and more

wretched than his victim—the avenger had devoted himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by

some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of

his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a

brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed, in great

part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions,

his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a

state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily

life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed

the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of

them were. There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in

acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr.

Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly

versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful

brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his,

and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite

understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal

ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and

unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others again,

true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil

among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover,

by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their

purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their

garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was,

the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in

tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech

in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole

human brotherhood in the heart’s native language. These fathers,

otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of

their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought—had

they ever dreamed of seeking—to express the highest truths through the

humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,

afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually

dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale,

by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the high

mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the

tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or

anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a

level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice

the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very

burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful

brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with

theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent its own throb of

pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive

eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew

not the power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a

miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven’s

messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very

ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew

pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious

sentiment, that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it

openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice

before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.

Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in

their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and

enjoined it upon their children that their old bones should be buried

close to their young pastor’s holy grave. And all this time, perchance,

when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with

himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed

thing must there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration

tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to

reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value,

that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then

what was he?—a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to

speak out from his own pulpit at the full height of his voice, and tell

the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black garments of

the priesthood—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face

heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with

the Most High Omniscience—I, in whose daily life you discern the

sanctity of Enoch—I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam

along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall come after me

may be guided to the regions of the blest—I, who have laid the hand of

baptism upon your children—I, who have breathed the parting prayer over

your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which

they had quitted—I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am

utterly a pollution and a lie!”

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose

never to come down its steps until he should have spoken words like the

above. More than once he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long,

deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come

burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more

than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had

told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the

vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable

iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his

wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of

the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the

people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him

down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it

all, and did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what

deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words. “The godly

youth!” said they among themselves. “The saint on earth! Alas! if he

discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle

would he behold in thine or mine!” The minister well knew—subtle, but

remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague

confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself

by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one

other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief

of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed

it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his

nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.

Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the

old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the church

in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale’s secret closet,

under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this

Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders,

laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more

pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it

has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast—not however, like

them, in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of

celestial illumination—but rigorously, and until his knees trembled

beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night

after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with a glimmering

lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the

most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the

constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify

himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and

visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a

faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more

vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a

herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister,

and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who

flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they

rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded

father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother turning her face away

as she passed by. Ghost of a mother—thinnest fantasy of a

mother—methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her

son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had

made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in

her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet

letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an

effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty

lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in

their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square,

leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that,

they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which

the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a

life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of

whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven

to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole

universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his

grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light,

becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that

continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the

anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in

his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of

gaiety, there would have been no such man!

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but

forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new

thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s peace in it. Attiring

himself with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and

precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid

the door, and issued forth.

XII.

THE MINISTER’S VIGIL

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually

under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale

reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived

through her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or

scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven

long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had

since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of the

meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night in early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled

the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude

which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her

punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have

discerned no face above the platform nor hardly the outline of a human

shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep.

There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it

so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other

risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame,

and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with

catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of

tomorrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that

ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody

scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of

penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with

itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends

rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the

impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own

sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably

drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse

had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what

right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for

the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it

press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good

purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of

spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another,

which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of

heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of

expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as

if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast,

right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there

had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without

any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked

aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten

back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the

background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and

terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it

to and fro.

“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.

“The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me here!”

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater

power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town

did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry

either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches,

whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the

settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the

air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,

uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows

of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood at some distance, on the

line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate

himself with a lamp in his hand a white night-cap on his head, and a

long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost evoked

unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At

another window of the same house, moreover appeared old Mistress

Hibbins, the Governor’s sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far

off revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She

thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.

Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes

and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with

whom she was well known to make excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady quickly

extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the

clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The

magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness—into which,

nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a

mill-stone—retired from the window.

The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon

greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off

was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition, on here

a post, and there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and

there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here again an arched

door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even

while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing

onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the

lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his

long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, he beheld, within its

illuminated circle, his brother clergyman—or, to speak more accurately,

his professional father, as well as highly valued friend—the Reverend

Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at

the bedside of some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister

came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had

passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. And now surrounded,

like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a radiant halo, that

glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin—as if the departed Governor

had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon

himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking

thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates—now, in

short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps

with a lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the

above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled—nay, almost laughed at

them—and then wondered if he was going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling

his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before

his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself

from speaking—

“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray

you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”

Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant he

believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered

only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to

step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his

feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When

the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister

discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last few

moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had

made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid

playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole

in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing

stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted

whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning

would break and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse

itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would

perceive a vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and

half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door to

door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost—as he needs must

think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its

wings from one house to another. Then—the morning light still waxing

stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his

flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their

night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never

heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would

start into public view with the disorder of a nightmare in their

aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King

James’ ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of

the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as

having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father

Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking

ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified

saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr.

Dimmesdale’s church, and the young virgins who so idolized their

minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which

now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have

given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a

word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their

amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they

discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with

shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,

unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of

laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish

laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart—but he knew not whether of

exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute—he recognised the tones of little

Pearl.

“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he, after a moment’s pause; then,

suppressing his voice—“Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?”

“Yes; it is Hester Prynne!” she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the

minister heard her footsteps approaching from the side-walk, along

which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.”

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

“I have been watching at a death-bed,” answered Hester Prynne “at

Governor Winthrop’s death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe,

and am now going homeward to my dwelling.”

“Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,” said the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale. “Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.

Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together.”

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding

little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child’s other hand,

and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a

tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own pouring like a

torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the

mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his

half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.

“Minister!” whispered little Pearl.

“What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

“Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, tomorrow noontide?” inquired

Pearl.

“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the

new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so

long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was

already trembling at the conjunction in which—with a strange joy,

nevertheless—he now found himself—“not so, my child. I shall, indeed,

stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not tomorrow.”

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

held it fast.

“A moment longer, my child!” said he.

“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and mother’s

hand, tomorrow noontide?”

“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister; “but another time.”

“And what other time?” persisted the child.

“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister; and, strangely

enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth

impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the

judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But the

daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and

wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those

meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to

waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its

radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud

betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of

an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the

distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always

imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden

houses, with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the

doorsteps and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them;

the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,

little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on either

side—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to

give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they

had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over

his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on

her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link

between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn

splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and

the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes; and her face, as she

glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its

expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.

Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his

hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric

appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred with less

regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many

revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword

of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky,

prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded

by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for

good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to

revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously

warned by some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by

multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of

some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured,

magnifying, and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more

distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that

the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful

hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be

deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The

belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that

their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of

peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an

individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the

same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom

of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly

self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his

egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself

should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and

fate.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart

that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the

appearance of an immense letter—the letter A—marked out in lines of

dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point,

burning duskily through a veil of cloud, but with no such shape as his

guilty imagination gave it, or, at least, with so little definiteness,

that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale’s

psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward

to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl

was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at

no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him,

with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his

feature as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new

expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful

then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he

looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,

and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester

Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger

Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there

with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression,

or so intense the minister’s perception of it, that it seemed still to

remain painted on the darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an

effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.

“Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror.

“I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!”

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

“I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again.

“Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless

horror of the man!”

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

“Quickly, then, child!” said the minister, bending his ear close to her

lips. “Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper.”

Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like human

language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing

themselves with by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any

secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a

tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the

bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud.

“Dost thou mock me now?” said the minister.

“Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!” answered the child. “Thou

wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, tomorrow

noontide!”

“Worthy sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot

of the platform—“pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well,

indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be

straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our

sleep. Come, good sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you

home!”

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

“Verily, and in good faith,” answered Roger Chillingworth, “I knew

nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the

bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill

might to give him ease. He, going home to a better world, I, likewise,

was on my way homeward, when this light shone out. Come with me, I

beseech you, Reverend sir, else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath

duty tomorrow. Aha! see now how they trouble the brain—these

books!—these books! You should study less, good sir, and take a little

pastime, or these night whimsies will grow upon you.”

“I will go home with you,” said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from an

ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which

was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with

heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it

is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy

of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude

towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But as he came

down the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a

black glove, which the minister recognised as his own.

“It was found,” said the Sexton, “this morning on the scaffold where

evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take

it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he

was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no

glove to cover it!”

“Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister, gravely, but startled

at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost

brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.

“Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”

“And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle

him without gloves henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly

smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last

night? a great red letter in the sky—the letter A, which we interpret

to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an

angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be

some notice thereof!”

“No,” answered the minister; “I had not heard of it.”

XIII.

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was

shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His

nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more

than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while

his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had

perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given

them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all

others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate action of

his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and

was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s well-being and repose. Knowing

what this poor fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by

the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her—the outcast

woman—for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She

decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little

accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of

right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or

seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her in reference to

the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world

besides. The links that united her to the rest of humankind—links of

flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—had all been

broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor

she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its

obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which

we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had

come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the

scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery,

had long been a familiar object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the

case when a person stands out in any prominence before the community,

and, at the same time, interferes neither with public nor individual

interests and convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately

grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human

nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it

loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet

process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded

by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.

In this matter of Hester Prynne there was neither irritation nor

irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but submitted

uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it in

requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.

Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during all these years in

which she had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her

favour. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no

hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only be a

genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor wanderer to

its paths.

It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the

humblest title to share in the world’s privileges—further than to

breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and

herself by the faithful labour of her hands—she was quick to

acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were

to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance

to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw

back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or

the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered

a monarch’s robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence

stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether

general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her

place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the

household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were

a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her

fellow-creature. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort

in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of

the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer’s hard

extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his

foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light

of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies Hester’s nature showed

itself warm and rich—a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to

every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with

its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed

one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say,

the world’s heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor

she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her

calling. Such helpfulness was found in her—so much power to do, and

power to sympathise—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A

by its original signification. They said that it meant Able, so strong

was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine

came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the

threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance

to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those

whom she had served so zealously. Meeting them in the street, she never

raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to

accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.

This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the

softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The

public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common

justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as

frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as

despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting

Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was

inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she

cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer

in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the

people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were

fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made

it a far tougher labour to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their

sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due

course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence.

Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position

imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private

life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay,

more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not

of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance,

but of her many good deeds since. “Do you see that woman with the

embroidered badge?” they would say to strangers. “It is our Hester—the

town’s own Hester—who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick,

so comfortable to the afflicted!” Then, it is true, the propensity of

human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the

person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of

bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of

the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the

cross on a nun’s bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness,

which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among

thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by

many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that

the missile struck it, and fell harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol—or rather, of the position in respect to

society that was indicated by it—on the mind of Hester Prynne herself

was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her

character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago

fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been

repulsive had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it.

Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change.

It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and

partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad

transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been

cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock

of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all

these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be

no longer anything in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in

Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever

dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom to make it

ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from

her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman.

Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the

feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and

lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all

tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be

crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so

deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is

perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to

be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the

magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester

Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed

to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from

passion and feeling to thought. Standing alone in the world—alone, as

to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and

protected—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she

not scorned to consider it desirable—she cast away the fragment of a

broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in

which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active

and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had

overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and

rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was

their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith

was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this

spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the

other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known

it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the

scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts

visited her such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England;

shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their

entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often

conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of

society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the

flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had

little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have

been far otherwise. Then she might have come down to us in history,

hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect.

She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and

not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of

the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan

establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother’s

enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence,

in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester’s charge, the

germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a

host of difficulties. Everything was against her. The world was

hostile. The child’s own nature had something wrong in it which

continually betokened that she had been born amiss—the effluence of her

mother’s lawless passion—and often impelled Hester to ask, in

bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor

little creature had been born at all.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference

to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to

the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she

had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as

settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as

it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a

hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society

is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the

opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like

nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to

assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other

difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these

preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still

mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she

has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never

overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be

solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they

vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and

healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind;

now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from

a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a

home and comfort nowhere. At times a fearful doubt strove to possess

her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven,

and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office. Now, however, her interview

with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given

her a new theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that

appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She

had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled,

or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he

stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it.

It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might

be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused

into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been

continually by his side, under the semblance of a friend and helper,

and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for

tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale’s nature. Hester

could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a

defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the

minister to be thrown into a position where so much evil was to be

foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification

lay in the fact that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing

him from a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by

acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth’s scheme of disguise. Under that

impulse she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared,

the more wretched alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her

error so far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard

and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with

Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and half-maddened

by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked together in

the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way since then to a higher

point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to

her level, or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which he had stooped

for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what

might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so

evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One

afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she

beheld the old physician with a basket on one arm and a staff in the

other hand, stooping along the ground in quest of roots and herbs to

concoct his medicine withal.

XIV.

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play

with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked

awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a

bird, and, making bare her small white feet went pattering along the

moist margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, and

peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for

Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with

dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes,

the image of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate,

invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary

little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say—“This is a

better place; come thou into the pool.” And Pearl, stepping in mid-leg

deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still

lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to

and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. “I would speak a word

with you,” said she—“a word that concerns us much.”

“Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger

Chillingworth?” answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture.

“With all my heart! Why, mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all

hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly

man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me

that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was

debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet

letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my

intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith.”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the badge,”

calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall

away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should

speak a different purport.”

“Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,” rejoined he, “A woman must

needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person. The

letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!”

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was

shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been

wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that

he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were

visible, he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and

alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man,

calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had

altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost

fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and

purpose to mask this expression with a smile, but the latter played him

false, and flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator

could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too,

there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old man’s

soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within his breast,

until by some casual puff of passion it was blown into a momentary

flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look as

if nothing of the kind had happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s

faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a

reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy

person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself for seven

years to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving

his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he

analysed and gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another

ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.

“What see you in my face,” asked the physician, “that you look at it so

earnestly?”

“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter

enough for it,” answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder

miserable man that I would speak.”

“And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved

the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only

person of whom he could make a confidant. “Not to hide the truth,

Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the

gentleman. So speak freely and I will make answer.”

“When we last spake together,” said Hester, “now seven years ago, it

was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching the former

relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder

man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent

in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings

that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other

human beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something

whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep your

counsel. Since that day no man is so near to him as you. You tread

behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You

search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is

on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death, and still

he knows you not. In permitting this I have surely acted a false part

by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!”

“What choice had you?” asked Roger Chillingworth. “My finger, pointed

at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon,

thence, peradventure, to the gallows!”

“It had been better so!” said Hester Prynne.

“What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again. “I

tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned

from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this

miserable priest! But for my aid his life would have burned away in

torments within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime

and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have

borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. Oh, I

could reveal a goodly secret! But enough. What art can do, I have

exhausted on him. That he now breathes and creeps about on earth is

owing all to me!”

“Better he had died at once!” said Hester Prynne.

“Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!” cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting

the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. “Better had he

died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And

all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me.

He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse. He

knew, by some spiritual sense—for the Creator never made another being

so sensitive as this—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his

heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which

sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand

were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied

himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams and

desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as a

foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant

shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had

most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual

poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a

fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a

fiend for his especial torment.”

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands

with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which

he could not recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a glass.

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval

of years—when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s

eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old

man’s look. “Has he not paid thee all?”

“No, no! He has but increased the debt!” answered the physician, and as

he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided

into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone?

Even then I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.

But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful,

quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own

knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but

casual to the other—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No

life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich

with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you

might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving

little for himself—kind, true, just and of constant, if not warm

affections? Was I not all this?”

“All this, and more,” said Hester.

“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting

the whole evil within him to be written on his features. “I have

already told thee what I am—a fiend! Who made me so?”

“It was myself,” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was I, not less than he.

Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth.

“If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!”

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

“It has avenged thee,” answered Hester Prynne.

“I judged no less,” said the physician. “And now what wouldst thou with

me touching this man?”

“I must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern

thee in thy true character. What may be the result I know not. But this

long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have

been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or

preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his

life, he is in my hands. Nor do I—whom the scarlet letter has

disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering

into the soul—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer

a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy.

Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no

good for thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to

guide us out of this dismal maze.”

“Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee,” said Roger Chillingworth, unable

to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a quality almost

majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great

elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than

mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been

wasted in thy nature.”

“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has

transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out

of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for

thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that

claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him,

or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of

evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have

strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee

alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will to

pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that

priceless benefit?”

“Peace, Hester—peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness—“it

is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me

of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all

that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant

the germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark

necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of

typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s

office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as

it may! Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of

gathering herbs.

XV.

HESTER AND PEARL

So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure with a face that haunted

men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and

went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there a herb,

or grubbed up a root and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray

beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after

him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see

whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath

him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown,

across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were

which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth,

quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with

poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under

his fingers? Or might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should

be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did

the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him?

Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving

along with his deformity whichever way he turned himself? And whither

was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a

barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen

deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable

wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous

luxuriance? Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so

much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?

“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she gazed

after him, “I hate the man!”

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or

lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days in

a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion

of his study and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the

light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he

said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books

might be taken off the scholar’s heart. Such scenes had once appeared

not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium

of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest

remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She

marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She

deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured

and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the

smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it

seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than any which

had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no

better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester more bitterly than before. “He

betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it

the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable

fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than

their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached

even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they

will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long

ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven

long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much

of misery and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the

crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on

Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise

have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

“Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for

amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At

first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image

in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to

venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable

earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or

the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made

little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,

and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New

England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She

seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several

five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then

she took up the white foam that streaked the line of the advancing

tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged

footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a

flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along the shore, the

naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from

rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity

in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was

almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken

wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport, because it

grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the

sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make

herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect

of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for devising

drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl

took some eel-grass and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom

the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A

letter—the letter A—but freshly green instead of scarlet. The child

bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with

strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she had been

sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother’s voice, and, flitting along as lightly

as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing,

laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.

“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green

letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know,

my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast

taught me in the horn-book.”

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that

singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes,

she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning

to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.

“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”

“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother’s face.

“It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his

heart!”

“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd

incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning

pale.

“What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”

“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously than

she was wont to speak. “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking

with,—it may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what

does this scarlet letter mean?—and why dost thou wear it on thy

bosom?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes

with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious

character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really

be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what

she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a

meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect.

Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a

sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return

than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy

sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in

its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take

it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes,

of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful

tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its

other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this,

moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition. Any other

observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them

a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s

mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might

already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend,

and intrusted with as much of her mother’s sorrows as could be

imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the

little chaos of Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging and

could have been from the very first—the steadfast principles of an

unflinching courage—an uncontrollable will—sturdy pride, which might be

disciplined into self-respect—and a bitter scorn of many things which,

when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them.

She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable,

as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling

attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her

mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this

elfish child.

Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet

letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch

of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed

mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of

justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked

propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask,

whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose

of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith

and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might

it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her

mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help her to

overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor

asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind, with

as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered

into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her

mother’s hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she

put these searching questions, once and again, and still a third time.

“What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it? and why

does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! if this be the

price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.”