C 22
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens on its way towards the meeting-house:
where, in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever
since observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an
Election Sermon.
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played
with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object for which the
harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitudeÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯that
of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that
passes before the eye. Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but
then lost for an instant the restless agitation that had kept her in a
continual effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently,
and seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long
heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former
mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright
armour of the military company, which followed after the music, and
formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from
past ages with an ancient and honourable fameÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯was composed of
no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who felt
the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of
College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars,
they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would
teach them, the practices of war. The high estimation then placed
upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port of each
individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their
services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European
warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of
soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and
with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of
effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer’s eye.
Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that
made the warrior’s haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an
age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now,
but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of
character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary
right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive
at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English
settler on these rude shoresÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯having left king, nobles, and all
degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of
reverence was strong in himÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯bestowed it on the white hair and
venerable brow of ageÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯on long-tried integrityÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯on solid wisdom and
sad-coloured experienceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯on endowments of that grave and weighty
order which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
thereforeÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeersÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up
for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous
tide. The traits of character here indicated were well represented in
the square cast of countenance and large physical development of
the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural
authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been
ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy
adopted into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the
Sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession at that era in
which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life;
forÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered
inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of
the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service.
Even political powerÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯as in the case of Increase MatherÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯was within
the grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never,
since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore,
had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with
which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness
of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand
rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly
viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and
imparted to him by angelical ministrations. It might be the
exhilaration of that potent cordial which is distilled only in the
furnace-glow of earnest and long-continued thought. Or perchance
his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing
music that swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending
wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be
questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale ever heard the music. There
was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But
where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying itself,
with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing,
heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the
spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along,
unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like itself. Men
of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this
occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of
many days and then are lifeless for as many more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not,
unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly
beyond her reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must
needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its
little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-
trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had mingled their sad and
passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How
deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She
hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it
were, in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and
venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still
more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through
which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must
have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there
could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus
much of woman was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive
himÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching
Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯for being able so
completely to withdraw himself from their mutual worldÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯while she
groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him
not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother’s feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy,
fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When
the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester’s faceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
“Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed me by
the brook?”
“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We
must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the
forest.”
“I could not be sure that it was heÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯so strange he looked,”
continued the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss
me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among the
dark old trees. What would the minister have said, mother? Would
he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and
bid me begone?”
“What should he say, Pearl,” answered Hester, “save that it was
no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-
place? Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!”
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricitiesÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
insanity, as we should term itÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯led her to do what few of the
townspeople would have ventured onÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯to begin a conversation with
the wearer of the scarlet letter in public. It was Mistress Hibbins,
who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered
stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had
come forth to see the procession. As this ancient lady had the
renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life) of
being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy that were
continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and
seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague
among its gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester PrynneÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
kindly as so many now felt towards the latterÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯the dread inspired by
Mistress Hibbins had doubled, and caused a general movement from
that part of the market-place in which the two women stood.
“Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?” whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester. “Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and asÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I must needs sayÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
he really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession,
would think how little while it is since he went forth out of his studyÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrantÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯to take
an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester
Prynne! But truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same
man. Many a church member saw I, walking behind the music, that
has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was
fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard
changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows
the world. But this minister. Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether
he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path?”
“Madam, I know not of what you speak,” answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled
and awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a
personal connexion between so many persons (herself among them)
and the Evil One. “It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and
pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.”
“Fie, womanÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯fie!” cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
“Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have
yet no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of
the wild garlands which they wore while they danced be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in
the sunshine! and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest
it openly, so there need be no question about that. But this minister!
Let me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his
own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so
that the mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the eyes of all
the world! What is that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand
always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?”
“What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?” eagerly asked little Pearl.
“Hast thou seen it?”
“No matter, darling!” responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. “Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another.
They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of Air! Wilt thou
ride with me some fine night to see thy father? Then thou shalt know
wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
were heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept
Hester near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged
to admit another auditor, she took up her position close beside the
scaffold of the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole
sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur
and flow of the minister’s very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the
preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere
tone and cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and
pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human
heart, wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage
through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such
intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had
throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable
words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been
only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now
she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose
itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive
gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to
envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And
yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was for ever in it
an essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of
anguishÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of
suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom! At
times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and
scarcely heard sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the
minister’s voice grew high and commandingÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯when it gushed
irrepressibly upwardÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯when it assumed its utmost breadth and
power, so overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid
walls, and diffuse itself in the open airÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯still, if the auditor listened
intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain.
What was it? The complaint of a human heart, sorrow-laden,
perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the
great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness,Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯at
every moment,Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯in each accent,Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯and never in vain! It was this
profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most
appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister’s voice had not kept her there, there would,
nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot,
whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a
sense within herÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing
heavily on her mindÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯that her whole orb of life, both before and after,
was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother’s side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a
bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by
darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of
the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp
and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit,
which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it
was played upon and vibrated with her mother’s disquietude.
Whenever Pearl saw anything to excite her ever active and
wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and, as we might say,
seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as she
desired it, but without yielding the minutest degree of control over
her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled,
were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon
offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity
that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew conscious of
a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still
with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of
mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians
were of the land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at
Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of a little
maid, and were gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath
the prow in the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had
spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl’s aspect, that he
attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss.
Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in
the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it,
and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck
and waist with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a
part of her, and it was difficult to imagine her without it.
“Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter,” said the
seaman, “Wilt thou carry her a message from me?”
“If the message pleases me, I will,” answered Pearl.
“Then tell her,” rejoined he, “that I spake again with the black-a-
visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his
friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother
take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou
witch-baby?”
“Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!” cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile. “If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall
tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!”
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child
returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had
said. Hester’s strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank, at
last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable
doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the
minister and herself out of their labyrinth of miseryÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯showed itself
with an unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster’s intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial. There were many people present from the country
round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it
had been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumours,
but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after
exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester
Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was,
however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several
yards. At that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the
centrifugal force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol
inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of
spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and
thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even
the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man’s
curiosity and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like
black eyes on Hester’s bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer
of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of
high dignity among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town
(their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same
quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the
rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame.
Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that group of
matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door
seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only
compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since
made. At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the
burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more remark
and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more
painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the
cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever,
the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit
upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his
control. The sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet
letter in the marketplace! What imagination would have been
irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on
them both!
