But how could the young minister say so, when,
with every successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler
and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than before,—
when it had now become a constant habit,
rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand over his
heart? Was he weary of his labors? Did he wish
to die? These questions were solemnly propounded
to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston
and the deacons of his church, who, to use their own
phrase, “dealt with him” on the sin of rejecting the
aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He
listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with
the physician.

“Were it God's will,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale,
when, in fulfilment of this pledge, he requested
old Roger Chillingworth's professional advice,
“I could be well content, that my labors, and my sorrows,
and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end
with me, and what is earthly of them be buried in my
grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal state,
rather than that you should put your skill to the proof
in my behalf.”

“Ah,” replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness
which, whether imposed or natural, marked all his
deportment, “it is thus that a young clergyman is apt
to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root,
give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men,
who walk with God on earth, would fain be away, to
walk with him on the golden pavements of the New
Jerusalem.”

“Nay,” rejoined the young minister, putting his

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

hand to his heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his
brow, “were I worthier to walk there, I could be better
content to toil here.”

“Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,”
said the physician.

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth
became the medical adviser of the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested
the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into
the character and qualities of the patient, these two
men, so different in age, came gradually to spend
much time together. For the sake of the minister's
health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with
healing balm in them, they took long walks on the seashore,
or in the forest; mingling various talk with the
plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem
among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was
the guest of the other, in his place of study and retirement.
There was a fascination for the minister
in the company of the man of science, in whom he
recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate
depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of
ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the
members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled,
if not shocked, to find this attribute in the physician.
Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist,
with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and
an order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along
the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually
deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society
would he have been what is called a man of liberal

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel
the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not the less,
however, though with a tremulous enjoyment, did he
feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe
through the medium of another kind of intellect than
those with which he habitually held converse. It was
as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his
life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed
day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it
sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air
was too fresh and chill to be long breathed, with comfort.
So the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew
again within the limits of what their church
defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient
carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life,
keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of
thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when
thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of
which might call out something new to the surface of
his character. He deemed it essential, it would seem,
to know the man, before attempting to do him good.
Whenever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases
of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities
of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination
were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork
there. So Roger Chillingworth—the man of
skill, the kind and friendly physician—strove to go

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles,
prying into his recollections, and probing every
thing with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in
a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator,
who has opportunity and license to undertake such a
quest, and skill to follow it up. A man burdened with
a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his
physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a
nameless something more,—let us call it intuition; if he
show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent
characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which
must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares
have spoken what he imagines himself only to have
thought; if such revelations be received without tumult,
and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy,
as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and
there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to
these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages
afforded by his recognized character as a
physician;—then, at some inevitable moment, will the
soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a
dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries
into the daylight.

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the
attributes above enumerated. Nevertheless, time went
on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said, grew up between
these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a
field as the whole sphere of human thought and study,
to meet upon; they discussed every topic of ethics and
religion, of public affairs, and private character; they

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed
personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the
physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the
minister's consciousness into his companion's ear. The
latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the nature
of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never fairly
been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the
friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by
which the two were lodged in the same house; so that
every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might
pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician.
There was much joy throughout the town, when
this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held
to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman's
welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such
as felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one
of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to
him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step,
however, there was no present prospect that Arthur
Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he
rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly
celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline.
Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale
so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel
always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill
which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only
at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent, old physician, with his concord
of paternal and reverential love for the young
pastor, was the very man, of all mankind, to be constantly
within reach of his voice.

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious
widow, of good social rank, who dwelt in a house covering
pretty nearly the site on which the venerable
structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It had
the grave-yard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field,
on one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious
reflections, suited to their respective employments, in
both minister and man of physic. The motherly care
of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front
apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains
to create a noontide shadow, when desirable.
The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to be
from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing
the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and
Nathan the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which
made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly
picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here, the
pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound
folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis,
and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant
divines, even while they vilified and decried that class
of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves.
On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not
such as a modern man of science would reckon even
tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus,
and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals,
which the practised alchemist knew well how to
turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation,
these two learned persons sat themselves down,
each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual
and not incurious inspection into one another's business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning
friends, as we have intimated, very reasonably
imagined that the hand of Providence had done all this,
for the purpose—besought in so many public, and
domestic, and secret prayers—of restoring the young
minister to health. But—it must now be said—another
portion of the community had latterly begun to take its
own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and
the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed
multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly
apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment,
as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great
and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often
so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character
of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the
case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice
against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument
worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged
handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of
London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder,
now some thirty years agone; he testified to having
seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company
with Doctor Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was
implicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or three
individuals hinted, that the man of skill, during his
Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments
by joining in the incantations of the savage priests;

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

who were universally acknowledged to be powerful enchanters,
often performing seemingly miraculous cures
by their skill in the black art. A large number—and
many of these were persons of such sober sense and
practical observation, that their opinions would have
been valuable, in other matters—affirmed that Roger
Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable
change while he had dwelt in town, and especially
since his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his
expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like.
Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face,
which they had not previously noticed, and which grew
still the more obvious to sight, the oftener they looked
upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in
his laboratory had been brought from the lower regions,
and was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might
be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the
smoke.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused
opinion, that the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
like many other personages of especial sanctity, in all
ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by
Satan himself, or Satan's emissary, in the guise of old
Roger Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the
clergyman's intimacy, and plot against his soul. No
sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which
side the victory would turn. The people looked, with
an unshaken hope, to see the minister come forth out
of the conflict, transfigured with the glory which he
would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless,

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

it was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony
through which he must struggle towards his triumph.

Alas, to judge from the gloom and terror in the
depths of the poor minister's eyes, the battle was a sore
one, and the victory any thing but secure!

p135-168 X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT.

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been
calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm
affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the
world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation,
as he imagined, with the severe and equal
integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if
the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines
and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human
passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he
proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce,
though still calm, necessity seized the old man within
its gripe, and never set him free again, until he had
done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's
heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather,
like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of
a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom,
but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.
Alas for his own soul, if these were what he sought!

Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician's
eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of
a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of
ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway
in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face.

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

The soil where this dark miner was working had perchance
shown indications that encouraged him.

“This man,” said he, at one such moment, to himself,
“pure as they deem him,—all spiritual as he
seems,—hath inherited a strong animal nature from
his father or his mother. Let us dig a little farther in
the direction of this vein!”

Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior,
and turning over many precious materials, in the
shape of high aspirations for the welfare of his race,
warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety,
strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by
revelation,—all of which invaluable gold was perhaps
no better than rubbish to the seeker,—he would turn
back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another
point. He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious
a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a
chamber where a man lies only half asleep,—or, it
may be, broad awake,—with purpose to steal the very
treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye.
In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would
now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity,
would be thrown across his victim. In other words,
Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced
the effect of spiritual intuition, would become
vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace
had thrust itself into relation with him. But old Roger
Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost
intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes
towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful,
sympathizing, but never intrusive friend.

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this
individual's character more perfectly, if a certain
morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not
rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no
man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy
when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving
the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory,
and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes
by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and
his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked
towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger Chillingworth,
while the old man was examining a bundle of
unsightly plants.

“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them,—
for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom,
now-a-days, looked straightforth at any object, whether
human or inanimate,—“where, my kind doctor, did
you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?”

“Even in the grave-yard, here at hand,” answered
the physician, continuing his employment. “They are
new to me. I found them growing on a grave, which
bore no tombstone, nor other memorial of the dead
man, save these ugly weeds that have taken upon themselves
to keep him in remembrance. They grew out
of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret
that was buried with him, and which he had done better
to confess during his lifetime.”

“Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly
desired it, but could not.”

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

“And wherefore?” rejoined the physician. “Wherefore
not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly
for the confession of sin, that these black weeds
have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest
an unspoken crime?”

“That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours,” replied
the minister. “There can be, if I forebode aright, no
power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether
by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets
that may be buried with a human heart. The heart,
making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce
hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall
be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy
Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human
thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a
part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow
view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly
err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction
of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting,
on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made
plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful
to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive,
moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable
secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last
day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”

“Then why not reveal them here?” asked Roger
Chillingworth, glancing quietly aside at the minister.
“Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail themselves
of this unutterable solace?”

“They mostly do,” said the clergyman, griping
hard at his breast, as if afflicted with an importunate

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

throb of pain. “Many, many a poor soul hath given
its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but
while strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever,
after such an outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed
in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at
last draws free air, after long stifling with his own
polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why
should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder,
prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart,
rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe
take care of it!”

“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,” observed
the calm physician.

“True; there are such men,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale.
“But, not to suggest more obvious reasons,
it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution
of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose it?—
guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal
for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from
displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of
men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved
by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better
service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go
about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as
new-fallen snow; while their hearts are all speckled
and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.”

“These men deceive themselves,” said Roger Chillingworth,
with somewhat more emphasis than usual,
and making a slight gesture with his forefinger. “They
fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

them. Their love for man, their zeal for God's service,—
these holy impulses may or may not coexist in
their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt
has unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate
a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify
God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean
hands! If they would serve their fellow-men, let
them do it by making manifest the power and reality of
conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement!
Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise
and pious friend, that a false show can be better—can
be more for God's glory, or man's welfare—than
God's own truth? Trust me, such men deceive themselves!”

“It may be so,” said the young clergyman indifferently,
as waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant
or unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed,
of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive
and nervous temperament.—“But, now, I would
ask of my well-skilled physician, whether, in good
sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care
of this weak frame of mine?”

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard
the clear, wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding
from the adjacent burial-ground. Looking
instinctively from the open window,—for it was summer-time,—
the minister beheld Hester Prynne and
little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed the
inclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but
was in one of those moods of perverse merriment
which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact.
She now skipped irreverently from one grave to
another; until, coming to the broad flat, armorial tomb-stone
of a departed worthy,—perhaps of Isaac Johnson
himself,—she began to dance upon it. In reply to
her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave
more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the
prickly burrs from a tall burdock, which grew beside the
tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them
along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the
maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature
was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did not pluck them
off.

Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached
the window, and smiled grimly down.

“There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no
regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or
wrong, mixed up with that child's composition,” remarked
he, as much to himself as to his companion.
“I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor
himself with water, at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.
What, in Heaven's name, is she? Is the imp altogether
evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable
principle of being?”

“None,—save the freedom of a broken law,” answered
Mr. Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as if he had
been discussing the point within himself. “Whether
capable of good, I know not.”

The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking
up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile
of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive
clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light
missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little
hands in the most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne,
likewise, had involuntarily looked up; and all these
four persons, old and young, regarded one another in
silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted,—
“Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old
Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of the
minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch
you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!”

So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing,
and frisking fantastically among the hillocks of the
dead people, like a creature that had nothing in common
with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned
herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made
afresh, out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted
to live her own life, and be a law unto herself,
without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a
crime.

“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth,
after a pause, “who, be her demerits what they
may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness
which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester
Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet
letter on her breast?”

“I do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman.
“Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her. There was
a look of pain in her face, which I would gladly have
been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must
needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all
up in his heart.”

There was another pause; and the physician began
anew to examine and arrange the plants which he had
gathered.

“You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he,
at length, “my judgment as touching your health.”

“I did,” answered the clergyman, “and would gladly
learn it. Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life or
death.”

“Freely, then, and plainly,” said the physician, still
busy with his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr.
Dimmesdale, “the disorder is a strange one; not so
much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested,—in so
far, at least, as the symptoms have been laid open to
my observation. Looking daily at you, my good Sir,
and watching the tokens of your aspect, now for months
gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be,
yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician
might well hope to cure you. But—I know not
what to say—the disease is what I seem to know, yet
know it not.”

“You speak in riddles, learned Sir,” said the pale
minister, glancing aside out of the window.

“Then, to speak more plainly,” continued the physician,
“and I crave pardon, Sir,—should it seem to
require pardon,—for this needful plainness of my
speech. Let me ask,—as your friend,—as one having
charge, under Providence, of your life and physical
well-being,—hath all the operation of this disorder been
fairly laid open and recounted to me?”

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

“How can you question it?” asked the minister.
“Surely, it were child's play to call in a physician,
and then hide the sore!”

“You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said
Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye,
bright with intense and concentrated intelligence, on
the minister's face. “Be it so! But, again! He
to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid
open knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he
is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we
look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after
all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual
part. Your pardon, once again, good Sir, if my speech
give the shadow of offence. You, Sir, of all men
whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest
conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak,
with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”

“Then I need ask no further,” said the clergyman,
somewhat hastily rising from his chair. “You deal not,
I take it, in medicine for the soul!”

“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth,
going on, in an unaltered tone, without heeding the
interruption,—but standing up, and confronting the
emaciated and white-cheeked minister with his low,
dark, and misshapen figure,—“a sickness, a sore
place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately
its appropriate manifestation in your bodily
frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal
the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first
lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?”

“No!—not to thee!—not to an earthly

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

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 reëstablish 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

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

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 a 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

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

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!

p135-181 XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART.

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

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,

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

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, uprose a grisly phantom,—
uprose 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

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

were 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 etherealized, 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; symbolizing, 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

[figure description] Page 171.[end figure description]

Mr. Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character,
naturally belonged. To their 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 angles 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

[figure description] Page 172.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

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, leathern-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 gayety, 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.

[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]

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.

p135-191 XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL.

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

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 hour 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 of 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 eyewitnesses 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
gray 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

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witchlady
had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted
it, with its multitudinous echoes and reverberations,
as the clamor of the fiends and night-hags, with
whom she was well known to make excursions into 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 farther
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 windowpane,
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

[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]

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 personages
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 were 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

[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]

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's ruff fastened askew; and Mistress

[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]

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 recognized
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

[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]

approaching from the sidewalk, 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

[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]

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 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

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with
their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps
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
splendor, 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

[figure description] Page 187.[end figure description]

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 this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen
by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested
on the faith of some lonely eyewitness, who beheld
the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting
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 expansive for
Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief
was a favorite 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

[figure description] Page 188.[end figure description]

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 characterized
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 features, 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!”

[figure description] Page 189.[end figure description]

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, to-morrow noontide!”

“Worthy Sir,” said 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.

[figure description] Page 190.[end figure description]

“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 strange 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 brain,—these books!—these books! You
should study less, good Sir, and take a little pastime;
or these night-whimseys will grow upon you!”

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

With a chill despondency, like one awaking, 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 gray-bearded sexton
met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister
recognized 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

[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]

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.”

p135-206 XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER.

[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]

clergyman, which she owed to no other, nor to the whole
world besides. The links that united her to the rest of
human kind—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

[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]

reckoned largely in her favor. With nothing now to
lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and
seemingly no wish, of gaining any thing, 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,—farther than to breathe the common air,
and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the
faithful labor 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-creatures. 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

[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]

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 sympathize,—
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

[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]

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 favored
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 framework
of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labor 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

[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]

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, but 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 any thing 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

[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]

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 woman, and ceased to
be so, might at any moment become a woman again,
if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration.
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 fragments
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

[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]

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 of it, would have held
to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized 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. Every thing
was against her. The world was hostile. The child's

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

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 woman 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 clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside

[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]

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 medicines withal.

p135-217 XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN.

[figure description] Page 203.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 204.[end figure description]

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 common
weal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your
bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my entreaty to the
worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith!”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take
off this 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
gayly 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 vigor and alertness. But the
former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm
and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him,

[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]

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.”

[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]

“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.

[figure description] Page 207.[end figure description]

“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.

[figure description] Page 208.[end figure description]

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;

[figure description] Page 209.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 210.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 211.[end figure description]

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.

p135-226 XV. HESTER AND PEARL.

[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 213.[end figure description]

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
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 fire-light 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

[figure description] Page 214.[end figure description]

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?”

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

[figure description] Page 215.[end figure description]

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 seabreeze,
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

[figure description] Page 216.[end figure description]

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 it 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

[figure description] Page 217.[end figure description]

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 begone 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

[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]

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 stedfast 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

[figure description] Page 219.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 220.[end figure description]

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!”

p135-235 XVI. A FOREST WALK.

[figure description] Page 221.[end figure description]

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 neighbouring 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 die 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

[figure description] Page 222.[end figure description]

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.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from
the peninsula to the mainland, was no other than a
footpath. It straggled onward into the mystery of the
primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and
stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed
such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester's
mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in
which she had so long been wandering. The day was
chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of
cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a
gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be
seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting
cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of
some long vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—
feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness
of the day and scene—withdrew itself as they
came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the
drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright.

“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not
love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is
afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There
it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let

[figure description] Page 223.[end figure description]

me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee
from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!”

“Nor ever will, my child, I hope,” said Hester.

“And why not, mother?” asked Pearl, stopping
short, just at the beginning of her race. “Will not it
come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?”

“Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and
catch the sunshine! It will soon be gone.”

Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled
to perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood
laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its splendor,
and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid
motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as
if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn
almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too.

“It will go now!” said Pearl, shaking her head.

“See!” answered Hester, smiling. “Now I can
stretch out my hand, and grasp some of it.”

As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished;
or, to judge from the bright expression that was dancing
on Pearl's features, her mother could have fancied
that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would
give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as
they should plunge into some gloomier shade. There
was no other attribute that so much impressed her with
a sense of new and untransmitted vigor in Pearl's nature,
as this never-failing vivacity of spirits; she had
not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in
these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the
troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this too was a
disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with

[figure description] Page 224.[end figure description]

which Hester had fought against her sorrows, before
Pearl's birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting
a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character.
She wanted—what some people want throughout life—
a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize
and make her capable of sympathy. But there
was time enough yet for little Pearl!

“Come, my child!” said Hester, looking about her,
from the spot where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine.
“We will sit down a little way within the wood,
and rest ourselves.”

“I am not aweary, mother,” replied the little girl.
“But you may sit down, if you will tell me a story
meanwhile.”

“A story, child!” said Hester. “And about
what?”

“O, a story about the Black Man!” answered Pearl,
taking hold of her mother's gown, and looking up, half
earnestly, half mischievously, into her face. “How he
haunts this forest, and carries a book with him,—a big,
heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black
Man offers his book and an iron pen to every body that
meets him here among the trees; and they are to write
their names with their own blood. And then he sets
his mark on their bosoms! Didst thou ever meet the
Black Man, mother?”

“And who told you this story, Pearl?” asked her
mother, recognizing a common superstition of the
period.

“It was the old dame in the chimney-corner, at the
house where you watched last night,” said the child.

[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]

“But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of
it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had
met him here, and had written in his book, and have
his mark on them. And that ugly-tempered lady, old
Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame
said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark
on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou
meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is
it true, mother? And dost thou go to meet him in the
night-time?”

“Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother
gone?” asked Hester.

“Not that I remember,” said the child. “If thou
fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou mightest take
me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But,
mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man?
And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his
mark?”

“Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?”
asked her mother.

“Yes, if thou tellest me all,” answered Pearl.

“Once in my life I met the Black Man!” said her
mother. “This scarlet letter is his mark!”

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into
the wood to secure themselves from the observation of
any casual passenger along the forest-track. Here they
sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which, at some
epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic
pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade,
and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a
little dell where they had seated themselves, with a

[figure description] Page 226.[end figure description]

leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook
flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and
drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had
flung down great branches, from time to time, which
choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies
and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter
and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of
pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes
follow along the course of the stream, they could catch
the reflected light from its water, at some short distance
within the forest, but soon lost all traces of it
amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush,
and here and there a huge rock, covered over with
gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of
granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the
course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with
its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out
of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or
mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool.
Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy,
like the voice of a young child that was spending its
infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be
merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre
hue.

“O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!”
cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. “Why
art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all
the time sighing and murmuring!”

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime
among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an

[figure description] Page 227.[end figure description]

experience that it could not help talking about it, and
seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled
the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed
from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But,
unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and
prattled airily along her course.

“What does this sad little brook say, mother?” inquired
she.

“If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook
might tell thee of it,” answered her mother, “even as it
is telling me of mine! But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep
along the path, and the noise of one putting aside
the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to
play, and leave me to speak with him that comes yonder.”

“Is it the Black Man?” asked Pearl.

“Wilt thou go and play, child?” repeated her mother.
“But do not stray far into the wood. And take
heed that thou come at my first call.”

“Yes, mother,” answered Pearl. “But, if it be the
Black Man, wilt thou not let me stay a moment, and
look at him, with his big book under his arm?”

“Go, silly child!” said her mother, impatiently.
“It is no Black Man! Thou canst see him now
through the trees. It is the minister!”

“And so it is!” said the child. “And, mother, he
has his hand over his heart! Is it because, when the
minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man
set his mark in that place? But why does he not
wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?”

[figure description] Page 228.[end figure description]

“Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou
wilt another time” cried Hester Prynne. “But do
not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble
of the brook.”

The child went singing away, following up the current
of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome
cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little
stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its
unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery
that had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation
about something that was yet to happen—within
the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had
enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break
off all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set
herself, therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones,
and some scarlet columbines that she found
growing in the crevices of a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne
made a step or two towards the track that led through
the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of
the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along
the path, entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which
he had cut by the way-side. He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his
air, which had never so remarkably characterized him
in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation
where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here
it was wofully visible, in this intense seclusion of the
forest, which of itself would have been a heavy trial to
the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait; as if
he saw no reason for taking one step farther, nor felt

[figure description] Page 229.[end figure description]

any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he
be glad of any thing, to fling himself down at the root
of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore.
The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually
accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no
matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was
too definite an object to be wished for, or avoided.

To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited
no symptom of positive and vivacious suffering,
except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he kept his
hand over his heart.

p135-244 XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER.

[figure description] Page 230.[end figure description]

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone
by, before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to
attract his observation. At length, she succeeded.

“Arthur Dimmesdale!” she said, faintly at first;
then louder, but hoarsely. “Arthur Dimmesdale!”

“Who speaks?” answered the minister.

Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect,
like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he
was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes
anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly
beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so
sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight
into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had
darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it
were a woman or a shadow. It may be, that his pathway
through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that
had stolen out from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet
letter.

“Hester! Hester Prynne!” said he. “Is it thou?
Art thou in life?”

“Even so!” she answered. “In such life as has
been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur
Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?”

[figure description] Page 231.[end figure description]

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one
another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted
of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim
wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world
beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately
connected in their former life, but now stood
coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar
with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of
disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken
at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise
at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them
their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history
and experience, as life never does, except at such
breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the
mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear, and
tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity,
that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand,
chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester
Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what
was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves,
at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken,—neither he nor she
assuming the guidance, but with an unexpressed consent,—
they glided back into the shadow of the woods,
whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap
of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting.
When they found voice to speak, it was, at first, only
to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintance
might have made, about the gloomy sky,
the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each.
Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step by step,

[figure description] Page 232.[end figure description]

into the themes that were brooding deepest in their
hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances,
they needed something slight and casual to run before,
and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their
real thoughts might be led across the threshold.

After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester
Prynne's.

“Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?”

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

“Hast thou?” she asked.

“None!—nothing but despair!” he answered.
“What else could I look for, being what I am, and
leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist,—a
man devoid of conscience,—a wretch with coarse and
brutal instincts,—I might have found peace, long ere
now. Nay, I never should have lost it! But, as matters
stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity
there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were
the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual
torment. Hester, I am most miserable!”

“The people reverence thee,” said Hester. “And
surely thou workest good among them! Doth this
bring thee no comfort?”

“More misery, Hester!—only the more misery!”
answered the clergyman, with a bitter smile. “As
concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have
no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can
a ruined soul, like mine, effect towards the redemption
of other souls?—or a polluted soul, towards their purification?
And as for the people's reverence, would
that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou

[figure description] Page 233.[end figure description]

deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand up in
my pulpit, and meet so many eyes turned upward to my
face, as if the light of heaven were beaming from it!—
must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening
to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking!—and then look inward, and discern the
black reality of what they idolize? I have laughed, in
bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between
what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at
it!”

“You wrong yourself in this,” said Hester, gently.
“You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is
left behind you, in the days long past. Your present
life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in
people's eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence
thus sealed and witnessed by good works? And
wherefore should it not bring you peace?”

“No, Hester, no!” replied the clergyman. “There
is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do
nothing for me! Of penance I have had enough! Of
penitence there has been none! Else, I should long
ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness,
and have shown myself to mankind as they will see
me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that
wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine
burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it
is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look
into an eye that recognizes me for what I am! Had
I one friend,—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom,
when sickened with the praises of all other men, I
could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest

[figure description] Page 234.[end figure description]

of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive
thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me!
But, now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all
death!”

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to
speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so
vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the
very point of circumstances in which to interpose what
she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke.

“Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,”
said she, “with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast
in me, the partner of it!”—Again she hesitated, but
brought out the words with an effort.—“Thou hast
long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him under
the same roof!”

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath,
and clutching at his heart as if he would have torn it
out of his bosom.

“Ha! What sayest thou?” cried he. “An enemy!
And under mine own roof! What mean you?”

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep
injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy
man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or,
indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one,
whose purposes could not be other than malevolent.
The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to
disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as
Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when
Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps,
in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the

[figure description] Page 235.[end figure description]

minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a
more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of
his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated. She now read his heart
more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual
presence of Roger Chillingworth,—the secret poison
of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,—and
his authorized interference, as a physician, with the
minister's physical and spiritual infirmities,—that these
bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose.
By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been
kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was,
not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and
corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could
hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal
alienation from the Good and True, of which madness
is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the
man, once,—nay, why should we not speak it?—
still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice
of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as
she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have
been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she
had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather
than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she
would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and
died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.

“O Arthur,” cried she, “forgive me! In all things
else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one
virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast
through all extremity; save when thy good,—thy life,

[figure description] Page 236.[end figure description]

—thy fame,—were put in question! Then I consented
to a deception. But a lie is never good, even
though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou
not see what I would say? That old man!—the
physician!—he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—
he was my husband!”

The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all
that violence of passion, which—intermixed, in more
shapes than one, with his higher, purer, softer qualities—
was, in fact, the portion of him which the Devil
claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest.
Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown, than
Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it
lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character
had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its
lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary
struggle. He sank down on the ground, and
buried his face in his hands.

“I might have known it!” murmured he. “I did
know it! Was not the secret told me in the natural
recoil of my heart, at the first sight of him, and as
often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand?
O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest
all the horror of this thing! And the shame!—the
indelicacy!—the horrible ugliness of this exposure of
a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat
over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for
this! I cannot forgive thee!”

“Thou shalt forgive me!” cried Hester, flinging
herself on the fallen leaves beside him. “Let God
punish! Thou shalt forgive!”

[figure description] Page 237.[end figure description]

With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw
her arms around him, and pressed his head against her
bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the
scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but
strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free,
lest he should look her sternly in the face. All the
world had frowned on her,—for seven long years had
it frowned upon this lonely woman,—and still she bore
it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes.
Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had
not died. But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and
sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear,
and live!

“Wilt thou yet forgive me?” she repeated, over
and over again. “Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou
forgive?”

“I do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister, at
length, with a deep utterance out of an abyss of sadness,
but no anger. “I freely forgive you now.
May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the
worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than
even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has
been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold
blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I,
Hester, never did so!”

“Never, never!” whispered she. “What we did
had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We
said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?”

“Hush, Hester!” said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising
from the ground. “No; I have not forgotten!”

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped

[figure description] Page 238.[end figure description]

in hand, on the mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life
had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the
point whither their pathway had so long been tending,
and darkening ever, as it stole along;—and yet it
inclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and
claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment.
The forest was obscure around them, and
creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The
boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while
one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if
telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or
constrained to forebode evil to come.

And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the
forest-track that led backward to the settlement, where
Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her
ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his
good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No
golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of
this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the
scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen
woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale,
false to God and man, might be, for one moment,
true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to
him.

“Hester,” cried he, “here is a new horror! Roger
Chillingworth knows your purpose to reveal his true
character. Will he continue, then, to keep our secret?
What will now be the course of his revenge?”

“There is a strange secrecy in his nature,” replied
Hester, thoughtfully; “and it has grown upon him by

[figure description] Page 239.[end figure description]

the hidden practices of his revenge. I deem it not
likely that he will betray the secret. He will doubtless
seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”

“And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing the
same air with this deadly enemy?” exclaimed Arthur
Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his
hand nervously against his heart,—a gesture that had
grown involuntary with him. “Think for me, Hester!
Thou art strong. Resolve for me!”

“Thou must dwell no longer with this man,” said
Hester, slowly and firmly. “Thy heart must be no
longer under his evil eye!”

“It were far worse than death!” replied the minister.
“But how to avoid it? What choice remains
to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered
leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me
what he was? Must I sink down there, and die at
once?”

“Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!” said Hester,
with the tears gushing into her eyes. “Wilt thou die
for very weakness? There is no other cause!”

“The judgment of God is on me,” answered the
conscience-stricken priest. “It is too mighty for me
to struggle with!”

“Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester,
“hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.”

“Be thou strong for me!” answered he. “Advise
me what to do.”

“Is the world then so narrow?” exclaimed Hester
Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively
exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so

[figure description] Page 240.[end figure description]

shattered and subdued, that it could hardly hold itself
erect. “Doth the universe lie within the compass of
yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a
leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither
leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement,
thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too! Deeper
it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to
be seen at every step; until, some few miles hence,
the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white
man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey
would bring thee from a world where thou hast been
most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy!
Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to
hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?”

“Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!”
replied the minister, with a sad smile.

“Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!”
continued Hester. “It brought thee hither. If thou
so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native
land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast
London,—or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant
Italy,—thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all these
iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy
better part in bondage too long already!”

“It cannot be!” answered the minister, listening as
if he were called upon to realize a dream. “I am
powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I am, I have
had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence
in the sphere where Providence hath placed me.
Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for

[figure description] Page 241.[end figure description]

other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though
an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and
dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an
end!”

“Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight
of misery,” replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy
him up with her own energy. “But thou shalt leave
it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as
thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou
freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea.
Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened!
Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew!
Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this
one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and
success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is
good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for
a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a
mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,—
as is more thy nature,—be a scholar and a sage
among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated
world. Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing,
save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur
Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high
one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame.
Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in
the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!—that
have made thee feeble to will and to do!—that will
leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!”

“O Hester!” cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose
eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed
up and died away, “thou tellest of running a race to a

[figure description] Page 242.[end figure description]

man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must
die here. There is not the strength or courage left
me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world,
alone!”

It was the last expression of the despondency of a
broken spirit. He lacked energy to grasp the better
fortune that seemed within his reach.

He repeated the word.

“Alone, Hester!”

“Thou shalt not go alone!” answered she, in a deep
whisper.

Then, all was spoken!

p135-257 XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.

[figure description] Page 243.[end figure description]

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with
a look in which hope and joy shone out, indeed, but
with fear betwixt them, and a kind of horror at her
boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at,
but dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage
and activity, and for so long a period not merely
estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated
herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without
rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as
intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the
gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that
was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she
roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For
years past she had looked from this estranged point of
view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the
clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows,
the fireside, or the church. The tendency of
her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The

[figure description] Page 244.[end figure description]

scarlet letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude!
These had been her teachers,—stern and wild
ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her
much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone
through an experience calculated to lead him beyond
the scope of generally received laws; although, in a
single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of
the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of
passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that
wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts,—for those it was easy to arrange,—
but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen
of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled
by its regulations, its principles, and even its
prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once
sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully
sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he
might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue,
than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester
Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy
had been little other than a preparation for this very
hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man
once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation
of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat,
that he was broken down by long and exquisite
suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by

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the very remorse which harrowed it; that, between
fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite,
conscience might find it hard to strike the balance;
that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an
enemy; that, finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary
and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there appeared
a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new
life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom
which he was now expiating. And be the stern and
sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once
made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state,
repaired. It may be watched and guarded; so that the
enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel,
and might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some
other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly
succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall,
and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that would
win over again his unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.
Let it suffice, that the clergyman resolved to
flee, and not alone.

“If, in all these past seven years,” thought he, “I
could recall one instant of peace or hope, I would yet
endure, for the sake of that earnest of Heaven's mercy.
But now,—since I am irrevocably doomed,—where-fore
should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned
culprit before his execution? Or, if this be
the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me,
I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it!
Neither can I any longer live without her

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companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,—so tender to
soothe! O Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes,
wilt Thou yet pardon me!”

“Thou wilt go!” said Hester calmly, as he met her
glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment
threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of
his breast. It was the exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner
just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart—
of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,
unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit
rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer
prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery
which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a
deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a
tinge of the devotional in his mood.

“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself.
“Methought the germ of it was dead in me!
O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have
flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—
down upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up
all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him
that hath been merciful! This is already the better
life! Why did we not find it sooner?”

“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne.
“The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon
it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and
make it as it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the
scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it
to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic

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token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With
a hand's breadth farther flight it would have fallen into
the water, and have given the little brook another woe
to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it
still kept murmuring about. But there lay the embroidered
letter, glittering like a lost jewel, which some
ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the
heart, and unaccountable misfortune.

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh,
in which the burden of shame and anguish departed
from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not
known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By
another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined
her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders,
dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth, and beamed
out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed
gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson
flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long
so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness
of her beauty, came back from what men call the
irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her
maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within
the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of
the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these
two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All
at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst
the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure
forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the

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yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the
gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had
made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now.
The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery,
which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild,
heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human
law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the
bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always
create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance,
that it overflows upon the outward world. Had the
forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in
Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!

Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little
Pearl! Thou hast seen her,—yes, I know it!—but
thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a
strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou
wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to
deal with her.”

“Dost thou think the child will be glad to know
me?” asked the minister, somewhat uneasily. “I
have long shrunk from children, because they often
show a distrust,—a backwardness to be familiar with
me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!”

“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But
she will love thee dearly, and thou her. She is not far
off. I will call her! Pearl! Pearl!”

“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder

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she is, standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off,
on the other side of the brook. So thou thinkest the
child will love me?”

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was
visible, at some distance, as the minister had described
her, like a bright-apparelled vision, in a sunbeam, which
fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The
ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct,—
now like a real child, now like a child's spirit,—
as the splendor went and came again. She heard
her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the
forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely,
while her mother sat talking with the clergyman. The
great black forest—stern as it showed itself to those
who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its
bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant, as
well as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her. It offered her
the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding
autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red
as drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These
Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild flavor.
The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains
to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but
soon repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her
young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low
branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a
sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from
the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either

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in anger or merriment,—for a squirrel is such a
choleric and humorous little personage that it is hard
to distinguish between his moods,—so he chattered
at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It
was a last year's nut, and already gnawed by his sharp
tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light footstep
on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as
doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew
his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,—but
here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,—
came up, and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his
savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth
seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these
wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred
wildness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined
streets of the settlement, or in her mother's cottage.
The flowers appeared to know it; and one and another
whispered, as she passed, “Adorn thyself with
me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—
and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and
anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the
freshest green, which the old trees held down before
her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her
young waist, and became a nymph-child, or an infant
dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with
the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned
herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came
slowly back.

Slowly; for she saw the clergyman!

p135-265 XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE.

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“Thou wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester
Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little
Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful? And
see with what natural skill she has made those simple
flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds,
and rubies, in the wood, they could not have
become her better. She is a splendid child! But I
know whose brow she has!”

“Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale,
with an unquiet smile, “that this dear child, tripping
about always at thy side, hath caused me many an
alarm? Methought—O Hester, what a thought is
that, and how terrible to dread it!—that my own features
were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly
that the world might see them! But she is mostly
thine!”

“No, no! Not mostly!” answered the mother
with a tender smile. “A little longer, and thou needest
not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But
how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild
flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom
we left in our dear old England, had decked her out
to meet us.”

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It was with a feeling which neither of them had
ever before experienced, that they sat and watched
Pearl's slow advance. In her was visible the tie that
united them. She had been offered to the world, these
seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which
was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—
all written in this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—
had there been a prophet or magician skilled to
read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness
of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might,
how could they doubt that their earthly lives and future
destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once the
material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they
met, and were to dwell immortally together? Thoughts
like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they
did not acknowledge or define—threw an awe about
the child, as she came onward.

“Let her see nothing strange—no passion nor
eagerness—in thy way of accosting her,” whispered
Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf,
sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant of emotion,
when she does not fully comprehend the why and
wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She
loves me, and will love thee!”

“Thou canst not think,” said the minister, glancing
aside at Hester Prynne, “how my heart dreads this
interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I already
told thee, children are not readily won to be
familiar with me. They will not climb my knee,
nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but
stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes,

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when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet
Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to
me! The first time,—thou knowest it well! The
last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of
yonder stern old Governor.”

“And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and
mine!” answered the mother. “I remember it; and
so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She may be strange
and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!”

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the
brook, and stood on the farther side, gazing silently
at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together on
the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her. Just
where she had paused the brook chanced to form a
pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect
image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness
of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers
and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized
than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with
the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of
its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child
herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood,
looking so stedfastly at them through the dim medium
of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified
with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward
as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood
another child,—another and the same,—with likewise
its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl;
as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest,
had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her

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mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to
return to it.

There was both truth and error in the impression;
the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's
fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from
her side, another inmate had been admitted within the
circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the
aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer,
could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew
where she was.

“I have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive
minister, “that this brook is the boundary between
two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl
again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends
of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running
stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay has already
imparted a tremor to my nerves.”

“Come, dearest child!” said Hester encouragingly,
and stretching out both her arms. “How slow thou
art! When hast thou been so sluggish before now?
Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also.
Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as
thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across the
brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young
deer!”

Pearl, without responding in any manner to these
honey-sweet expressions, remained on the other side
of the brook. Now she fixed her bright, wild eyes
on her mother, now on the minister, and now included
them both in the same glance; as if to detect and explain
to herself the relation which they bore to one

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another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur
Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon himself, his
hand—with that gesture so habitual as to have become
involuntary—stole over his heart. At length,
assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out
her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and
pointing evidently towards her mother's breast. And
beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the
flower-girdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing
her small forefinger too.

“Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to
me?” exclaimed Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown
gathered on her brow; the more impressive from the
childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the features that
conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to
her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed
smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet
more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again,
was the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected
frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving
emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.

“Hasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee!”
cried Hester Prynne, who, however inured to such
behaviour on the elf-child's part at other seasons, was
naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now.
“Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run
hither! Else I must come to thee!”

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats,
any more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly
burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently,

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and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant
contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with
piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all
sides; so that, alone as she was in her childish and
unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude
were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath
of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers,
but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the
midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's
bosom!

“I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester to the
clergyman, and turning pale in spite of a strong effort
to conceal her trouble and annoyance. “Children
will not abide any, the slightest, change in the accustomed
aspect of things that are daily before their eyes.
Pearl misses something which she has always seen me
wear!”

“I pray you,” answered the minister, “if thou hast
any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith!
Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch, like
Mistress Hibbins,” added he, attempting to smile.
“I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter
than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect.
Pacify her, if thou lovest me!”

Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson
blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the
clergyman, and then a heavy sigh; while, even before
she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly
pallor.

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