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 vigor 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 analyzed 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. O, 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 heart-strings, 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 recognize, 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 have 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 thy 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 wellnigh 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.
[Illustration: Mandrake]
[Illustration]
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 an 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?
[Illustration: “He gathered herbs here and there”]
“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as she still 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 emotions 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?”
[Illustration: Pearl on the Sea-Shore]
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 snail-shells, 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 horseshoe 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 snow-flakes 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 sea-weed, 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 misdemeanors, 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 coloring. 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 be 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,—a
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 flavors 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.”
Then she spoke aloud.
“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many
things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of
the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the
sake of its gold-thread.”
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been
false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman
of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her;
as recognizing that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some
new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled.
As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three
times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at
supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after
she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief
gleaming in her black eyes.
“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”
And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being
awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that
other inquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her
investigations about the scarlet letter:—
“Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?”
“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease
me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVI.
A FOREST WALK.
Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr.
Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences,
the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For
several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing
him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the
habit of taking, along the shores of the peninsula, or on the wooded
hills of the neighboring country. There would have been no scandal,
indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame,
had she visited him in his own study; where many a penitent, ere now,
had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by
the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or
undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that
her conscious heart imputed suspicion where none could have been felt,
and partly that both the minister and she would need the whole wide
world to breathe in, while they talked together,—for all these
reasons, Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy
than beneath the open sky.
At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had
gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian
converts. He would probably return, by a certain hour, in the
afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took
little Pearl,—who was necessarily the companion of all her mother’s
expeditions, however inconvenient her presence,—and set forth.