C 12 ‘
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 unwearied 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 to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could
see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his
closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither?
Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in
which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed
and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been
driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him
everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion
was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her
tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the
verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity
like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who
have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert
their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at
once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet
continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same
inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain
repentance.
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of
mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked
breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and
there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily
pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he
shrieked aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and
was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from
the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so
much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and
were bandying it to and fro.
“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands. “The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me
here!”
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far
greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed.
The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook
the cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of
witches, whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over
the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through
the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of
disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the
chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood
at some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the
appearance of the old magistrate himself with a lamp in his hand a
white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping his
figure. He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the grave.
The cry had evidently startled him. At another window of the same
house, moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor’s
sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far off revealed the
expression of her sour and discontented face. She thrust forth her
head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward Beyond the
shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.
Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the 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 darknessÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯into
which, nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into
a mill-stoneÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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, be beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as
highly valued friendÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 sinÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯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 smiledÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯nay,
almost laughed at themÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 speakingÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
“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
ghostÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯as he needs must think itÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯of some defunct transgressor. A
dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. ThenÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
the morning light still waxing strongerÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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-bye, 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 heartÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯but he knew not whether of
exquisite pain, or pleasure as acuteÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯he recognised the tones of
little Pearl.
“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he, after a moment’s pause; then,
suppressing his voiceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯”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, to-morrow noontide?”
inquired Pearl.
“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the
new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had
so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he
was already trembling at the conjunction in whichÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯with a strange
joy, neverthelessÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯he now found himselfÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯”not so, my child. I shall,
indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not to-
morrow.”
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the
minister held it fast.
“A moment longer, my child!” said he.
“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and
mother’s hand, to-morrow noontide?”
“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister; “but another time.”
“And what other time?” persisted the child.
“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister; and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth
impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But
the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”
Pearl laughed again.
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 sideÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 occured
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 letterÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯the letter AÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 hinting 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!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯thou wast not true!” answered the child.
“Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-
morrow noon-tide!”
“Worthy sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to
the foot of the platformÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯”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 to-morrow. Aha! see now how they trouble
the brainÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯these books!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯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 skyÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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.”
