The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #25344 · 511,493 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Engraver: A. V. S. Anthony
Illustrator: Mary Hallock Foote
Ludvig Sandöe Ipsen
Release date: May 5, 2008 [eBook #25344]
Most recently updated: July 15, 2025
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25344
Credits: Markus Brenner, Irma Spehar and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCARLET LETTER ***
THE SCARLET LETTER.
BY
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
Illustrated.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1878.
COPYRIGHT, 1850 AND 1877.
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
_All rights reserved._
October 22, 1874.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Much to the author’s surprise, and (if he may say so without
additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his
sketch of official life, introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has
created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community
immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent,
indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last
smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against
whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public
disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of
deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read
over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge
whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his
power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it
appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are
its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which
he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein
described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or
political, he utterly disclaims such motives. The sketch might,
perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or
detriment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, he
conceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier
spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect
of truth.
The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory
sketch without the change of a word.
SALEM, March 30, 1850.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE CUSTOM HOUSE.—INTRODUCTORY 1
THE SCARLET LETTER.
I. THE PRISON-DOOR 51
II. THE MARKET-PLACE 54
III. THE RECOGNITION 68
IV. THE INTERVIEW 80
V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 90
VI. PEARL 104
VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL 118
VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 129
IX. THE LEECH 142
X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 155
XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART 168
XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL 177
XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 193
XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN 204
XV. HESTER AND PEARL 212
XVI. A FOREST WALK 223
XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 231
XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 245
XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 253
XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE 264
XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 277
XXII. THE PROCESSION 288
XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER 302
XXIV. CONCLUSION 315
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
_Drawn by_ MARY HALLOCK FOOTE _and Engraved by_ A. V. S. ANTHONY. _The
ornamental head-pieces are by_ L. S. IPSEN.
PAGE
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 1
THE PRISON DOOR 49
VIGNETTE,—WILD ROSE 51
THE GOSSIPS 57
“STANDING ON THE MISERABLE EMINENCE” 65
“SHE WAS LED BACK TO PRISON” 78
“THE EYES OF THE WRINKLED SCHOLAR GLOWED” 87
THE LONESOME DWELLING 93
LONELY FOOTSTEPS 99
VIGNETTE 104
A TOUCH OF PEARL’S BABY-HAND 113
VIGNETTE 118
THE GOVERNOR’S BREASTPLATE 125
“LOOK THOU TO IT! I WILL NOT LOSE THE CHILD!” 135
THE MINISTER AND LEECH 148
THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 165
THE VIRGINS OF THE CHURCH 172
“THEY STOOD IN THE NOON OF THAT STRANGE SPLENDOR” 185
HESTER IN THE HOUSE OF MOURNING 195
MANDRAKE 211
“HE GATHERED HERBS HERE AND THERE” 213
PEARL ON THE SEA-SHORE 217
“WILT THOU YET FORGIVE ME?” 237
A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE 249
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 257
CHILLINGWORTH,—“SMILE WITH A SINISTER MEANING” 287
NEW ENGLAND WORTHIES 289
“SHALL WE NOT MEET AGAIN?” 311
HESTER’S RETURN 320
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.
[Illustration: The Custom-House]
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.
INTRODUCTORY TO “THE SCARLET LETTER.”
It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch
of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal
friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have
taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was
three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and
for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the
intrusive author could imagine—with a description of my way of life
in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my
deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former
occasion—I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three
years’ experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous
“P. P., Clerk of this Parish,” was never more faithfully followed. The
truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon
the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his
volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him,
better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors,
indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such
confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed,
only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy;
as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were
certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature,
and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion
with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we
speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance
benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his
audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and
apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk;
and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of
ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent,
and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical,
without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining
how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession,
and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein
contained. This, in fact,—a desire to put myself in my true position
as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales
that make up my volume,—this, and no other, is my true reason for
assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the
main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to
give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore
described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among
whom the author happened to make one.
* * * * *
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago,
in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,—but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a
Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,—at the
head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often
overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of
unthrifty grass,—here, with a view from its front windows adown this
not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a
spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops,
in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen
stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus
indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s
government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico
of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a
flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the
entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with
outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect
aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each
claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and
the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the
inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of
their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows
with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are
seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of
the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the
softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great
tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener
soon than late,—is apt to fling off her nestlings, with a scratch of
her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed
arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port—has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn
by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,
however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with
a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of
that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by
itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and
ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their
ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood
of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or
four vessels happen to have arrived at once,—usually from Africa or
South America,—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the
granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may
greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel’s
papers under his arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his
owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as
his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in
merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him
under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will care to rid him of.
Here, likewise,—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded,
care-worn merchant,—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste
of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures
in his master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic-boats upon
a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor
in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and
feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the
captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the
British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the
alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight
importance to our decaying trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time
being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,
however, on ascending the steps, you would discern—in the entry, if
it were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms, if wintry or
inclement weather—a row of venerable figures, sitting in
old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back
against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might
be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and
with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of
almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on
charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but their own
independent exertions. These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at
the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands—were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty
height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the
aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow
lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of
the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers;
around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and
gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt
the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with
old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has
elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from
the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into
which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very
infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside
it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and
infirm; and—not to forget the library—on some shelves, a score or
two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the
Revenue Laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a
medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And
here, some six months ago,—pacing from corner to corner, or lounging
on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes
wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper,—you might
have recognized, honored reader, the same individual who welcomed you
into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so
pleasantly through the willow branches, on the western side of the Old
Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire
in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform has swept him
out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity, and pockets
his emoluments.
This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it, both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess,
a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized
during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to
architectural beauty,—its irregularity, which is neither picturesque
nor quaint, but only tame,—its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows
Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the
other,—such being the features of my native town, it would be quite
as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is
within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase,
I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably
assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into
the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the
original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance
in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a
city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have
mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion
of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment
which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few
of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation
is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to
know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on
account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned
progenitor,—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and
trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a
figure, as a man of war and peace,—a stronger claim than for myself,
whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter
persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their
histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman
of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any
record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too,
inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in
the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to
have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry
bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if
they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these
ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of
Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the
heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events,
I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I
have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race,
for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and
henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans
would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins,
that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family
tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its
topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever
cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine—if my
life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by
success—would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively
disgraceful. “What is he?” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers
to the other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in
life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in
his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might
as well have been a fiddler!” Such are the compliments bandied between
my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let
them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have
intertwined themselves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town’s earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here;
always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known,
disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the
other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable
deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.
Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and
there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the
accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred
years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each
generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a
boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting
the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and
grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to
the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the
natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its
place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being
and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or
moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.
The new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land, or whose
father or grandfather came—has little claim to be called a Salemite;
he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old
settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot
where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter
that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the
chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;—all these,
and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the
purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal
spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it
almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of
features and cast of character which had all along been familiar
here,—ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave,
another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street,—might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the
old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the
connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be
severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it
be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the
same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so
far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their
roots into unaccustomed earth.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a
place in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice, when I might as well, or better,
have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first
time, nor the second, that I had gone away,—as it seemed,
permanently,—but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if
Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine
morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President’s
commission in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen
who were to aid me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive
officer of the Custom-House.
I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do not doubt at all—whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military
line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his
orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once
settled, when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before
this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had kept the
Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude,
which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier,—New
England’s most distinguished soldier,—he stood firmly on the pedestal
of his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of
the successive administrations through which he had held office, he
had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and
heart-quake. General Miller was radically conservative; a man over
whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself
strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even
when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on
taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were
ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on
every sea, and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blasts,
had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to
disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence. Though
by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity,
they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two
or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic,
or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the
Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid
winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go
lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and
convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to
the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of
these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my
representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon
afterwards—as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their
country’s service, as I verily believe it was—withdrew to a better
world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my interference,
a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and
corrupt practices into which, as a matter of course, every
Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither the front nor
the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and
though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his
office with any reference to political services. Had it been
otherwise,—had an active politician been put into this influential
post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector,
whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his
office,—hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of
official life, within a month after the exterminating angel had come
up the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to
bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine.
It was plain enough to discern, that the old fellows dreaded some such
discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to
behold the terrors that attended my advent; to see a furrowed cheek,
weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the
glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or
another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days,
had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to
frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old
persons, that, by all established rule,—and, as regarded some of
them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business,—they
ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in politics,
and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I
knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the
knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and
considerably to the detriment of my official conscience, they
continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and
loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of
time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs
tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition
of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords
and countersigns among them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no
great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy
consciousness of being usefully employed,—in their own behalf, at
least, if not for our beloved country,—these good old gentlemen went
through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously, under their
spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels! Mighty was their
fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness
that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such
a mischance occurred,—when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had
been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses,—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity
with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with
tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel.
Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed
rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution, after the
mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of
their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish
habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my
companion’s character, if it have a better part, is that which usually
comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize
the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers had good traits,
and as my position in reference to them, being paternal and
protective, was favorable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon
grew to like them all. It was pleasant, in the summer forenoons,—when
the fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family,
merely communicated a genial warmth to their half-torpid systems,—it
was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them
all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of
past generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from
their lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common
with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense
of humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam
that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect
alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case,
however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the
phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.
It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent
all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place,
my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in
their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether
superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their
evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were
sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good
repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there
will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from
their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all
the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many
opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their
memories with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction
of their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, to-day’s, or to-morrow’s
dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the
world’s wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.
The father of the Custom-House—the patriarch, not only of this little
squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of
tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent
Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or, rather, born in the purple; since his
sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had
created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period
of the early ages which few living men can now remember. This
Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or
thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of
winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s
search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in
a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale
and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind
of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and
infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which
perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the
tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came
strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a
clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal,—and there was very
little else to look at,—he was a most satisfactory object, from the
thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his
capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the
delights which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The careless
security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income, and
with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt
contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The original and more
potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of his animal
nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the very trifling
admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities,
indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from
walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of
feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few
commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew
inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably,
and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband
of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children,
most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had likewise
returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow
enough to imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, with a
sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to
carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next
moment, he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far
readier than the Collector’s junior clerk, who, at nineteen years, was
much the elder and graver man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity, than any other form of humanity there presented to
my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one
point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an
absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no
soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but
instincts: and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his
character been put together, that there was no painful perception of
deficiency, but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found
in him. It might be difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he
should exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but
surely his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his
last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral
responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope
of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the
dreariness and duskiness of age.
One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had
made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His
gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of
roast-meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he
possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any
spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to
subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and
satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s
meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table.
His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the
actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one’s
very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate that had lingered
there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently
as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for his
breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest
at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was
marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually
rising up before him; not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful
for his former appreciation and seeking to resuscitate an endless
series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tender-loin of
beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular
chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps
adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered;
while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events
that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him
with as little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief
tragic event of the old man’s life, so far as I could judge, was his
mishap with a certain goose which lived and died some twenty or forty
years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table,
proved so inveterately tough that the carving-knife would make no
impression on its carcass, and it could only be divided with an axe
and handsaw.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be
glad to dwell at considerably more length because, of all men whom I
have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House
officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to
hint at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The
old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office
to the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down
to dinner with just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively
few opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the
merest outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General,
who, after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he
had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years
before, to spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. The
brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore
years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march,
burdened with infirmities which even the martial music of his own
spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. The
step was palsied now that had been foremost in the charge. It was only
with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on
the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascend the
Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor,
attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit,
gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came
and went; amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the
discussion of business, and the casual talk of the office; all which
sounds and circumstances seemed but indistinctly to impress his
senses, and hardly to make their way into his inner sphere of
contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly.
If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest
gleamed out upon his features; proving that there was light within
him, and that it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp
that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you penetrated
to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When no longer
called upon to speak, or listen, either of which operations cost him
an evident effort, his face would briefly subside into its former not
uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for,
though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework
of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled
into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however, under such
disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up
anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view
of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may
remain almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound,
cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of
peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,—for, slight
as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that
of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be
termed so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was
marked with the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not
by a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished
name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by
an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required
an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles
to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the
man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his
nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that
flashes and flickers in a blaze; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of
iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression
of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at
the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under
some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,—roused
by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all his energies that were
not dead, but only slumbering,—he was yet capable of flinging off his
infirmities like a sick man’s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize
a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so
intense a moment, his demeanor would have still been calm. Such an
exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be
anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him—as evidently as the
indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga already cited as the most
appropriate simile—were the features of stubborn and ponderous
endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier
days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a
somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unmanageable as a
ton of iron ore; and of benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the
bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine
a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of
the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I
know,—certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep
of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its
triumphant energy;—but, be that as it might, there was never in his
heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly’s
wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more
confidently make an appeal.
Many characteristics—and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or
been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful
attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the
human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and
proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows
wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in
respect of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A
ray of humor, now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim
obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native
elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or
early youth, was shown in the General’s fondness for the sight and
fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize only
the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one who seemed to have a
young girl’s appreciation of the floral tribe.
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while
the Surveyor—though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation—was fond
of standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost
slumberous countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him
but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair;
unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and
touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within
his thoughts, than amid the unappropriate environment of the
Collector’s office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the
battle; the flourish of old, heroic music, heard thirty years
before;—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his
intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and shipmasters, the
spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of
this commercial and custom-house life kept up its little murmur round
about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General
appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of
place as an old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed once in the
battle’s front, and showed still a bright gleam along its blade—would
have been, among the inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers, on
the Deputy Collector’s desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier,—the man of true and simple
energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of
his,—“I’ll try, Sir!”—spoken on the very verge of a desperate and
heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England
hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our
country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase—which it
seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger
and glory before him, has ever spoken—would be the best and fittest
of all mottoes for the General’s shield of arms.
It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health,
to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and
abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of
my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more
fulness and variety than during my continuance in office. There was
one man, especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new
idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of
business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through
all perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish,
as by the waving of an enchanter’s wand. Bred up from boyhood in the
Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many
intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper, presented
themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly comprehended
system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He
was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the
main-spring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for,
in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to
subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading
reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by
an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did
our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody
met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our
stupidity,—which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short
of crime,—would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make
the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him
not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect: it
was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor
can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so
remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the
administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything
that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man
very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, that an
error in the balance of an account or an ink-blot on the fair page of
a book of record. Here, in a word,—and it is a rare instance in my
life,—I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the situation
which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown
into a position so little akin to my past habits, and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile
influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days
on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after
growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of
Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at
Longfellow’s hearthstone;—it was time, at length, that I should
exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food
for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector
was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I
look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally
well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough
organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle
at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur
at the change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in
my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart
from me. Nature,—except it were human nature,—the nature that is
developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all
the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed
away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty if it had not departed, was
suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something
sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it
lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It
might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not with
impunity be lived too long; else, it might have made me permanently
other than I had been without transforming me into any shape which it
would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other
than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low
whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and whenever a new
change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come.
Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I
have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of
thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s
proportion of those qualities) may, at any time, be a man of affairs,
if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers,
and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties
brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light,
and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume,
had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the
more for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the
matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written
with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a
custom-house officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good
lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of
literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s
dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in
which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of
significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he
aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the
way of warning or rebuke; but, at any rate, I learned it thoroughly:
nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home
to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in
a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an
excellent fellow, who came into office with me and went out only a
little later—would often engage me in a discussion about one or the
other of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s
junior clerk, too—a young gentleman who, it was whispered,
occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam’s letter-paper with what (at
the distance of a few yards) looked very much like poetry—used now and
then to speak to me of books, as matters with which I might possibly
be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was
quite sufficient for my necessities.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.
The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint,
on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of
all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities
had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on
such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a
name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I
hope, will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,
revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of
bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of
literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now
writing.
In the second story of the Custom-House there is a large room, in
which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale
adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea
of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far
more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall,
therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this
day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams,
appears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one
end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how
many days and weeks and months and years of toil had been wasted on
these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and
were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But, then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled not
with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in
their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of
all—without purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood
which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless
scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as
materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former
commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely
merchants,—old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and
many another magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was
scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain pile of wealth began to
dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty
and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much
posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon
as long-established rank.
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the King’s officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the
Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the
names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on ’Change, nor
very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity,—and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of
the old town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only
Salem knew the way thither,—I chanced to lay my hand on a small
package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.
This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long
past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more
substantial materials than at present. There was something about it
that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded
red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure
would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the
parchment cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and
seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of
his Majesty’s Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay. I remember to have read (probably in Felt’s Annals)
a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years
ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the
digging up of his remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter’s
Church, during the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call
to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect
skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic
frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very
satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers which the
parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr.
Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or at least written in his private capacity, and apparently with his
own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of
Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened
suddenly; and that these papers, which he probably kept in his
official desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were
supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of
the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public
concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early
day, with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted
some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian,
and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material
for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up
with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in
the preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the
present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so
far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration
for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they
shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, to
take the unprofitable labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I
contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.
But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package,
was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There
were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly
frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the glitter was
left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful
skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies
conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art,
not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads.
This rag of scarlet cloth,—for time and wear and a sacrilegious moth
had reduced it to little other than a rag,—on careful examination,
assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an
accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches
and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no
doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn,
or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by
it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in
these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely
interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet
letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep
meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were,
streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to
my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.
While thus perplexed,—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether
the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the
white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of Indians,—I
happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,—the reader may
smile, but must not doubt my word,—it seemed to me, then, that I
experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, of
burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot
iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had
been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find,
recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation
of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets containing
many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester
Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the
view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period between
the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from
whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in
their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and
solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date,
to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing
whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise,
to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart; by which
means, as a person of such propensities inevitably must, she gained
from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine,
was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying
further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and
sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is
referred to the story entitled “THE SCARLET LETTER”; and it should be
borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are
authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The
original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself,—a most
curious relic,—are still in my possession, and shall be freely
exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the
narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood as
affirming, that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the
motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure
in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old
Surveyor’s half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have
allowed myself, as to such points, nearly or altogether as much
license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I
contend for is the authenticity of the outline.
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track.
There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as
if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and
wearing his immortal wig,—which was buried with him, but did not
perish in the grave,—had met me in the deserted chamber of the
Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who had borne his
Majesty’s commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of
the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike,
alas! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant
of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the
lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen
but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the
little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he
had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and
reverence towards him,—who might reasonably regard himself as my
official ancestor,—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations
before the public. “Do this,” said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its
memorable wig,—“do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You
will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine,
when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom.
But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your
predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully due!” And I
said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, “I will!”
On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and
fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundred-fold repetition, the
long extent from the front-door of the Custom-House to the
side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance
of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and
returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to
say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a
sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion—was, to get an
appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by
the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only
valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted
is the atmosphere of a custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy
and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies
yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would
ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a
tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable
by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would
take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but
retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face
with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. “What have you
to do with us?” that expression seemed to say. “The little power you
might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You
have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn
your wages!” In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy
twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks, and
rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and
reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of
Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought
the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The
same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort,
accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most
absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I
sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire
and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to
lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or
played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as
by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and
fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them,—of no great richness or value, but the best
I had,—was gone from me.
It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous
coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was
a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age;
or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter,
when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser
effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through
the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright
transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so
heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that
lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary
characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The
page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and
commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A
better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.
These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That
was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling,
without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the
fact there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some
other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it
here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can
hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many
reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and
another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an
honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united
effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on
the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from
him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of
his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an
unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do
not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.
The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him
forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom
happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own
ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter
along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his
own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he
forever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support
external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the
convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after
death—is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy
coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This
faith, more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out
of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil
and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the
mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will
raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go
to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at
monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his
Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of
office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease.
Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old
gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of
the Devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or
he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage
and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the
emphasis to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of
its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had
already accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much
longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To
confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension,—as it would never
be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,
and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,—it
was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and
decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as
the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official
life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend,—to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and
to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the
sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who
felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the
whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I
was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the
tone of “P. P.”—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of
official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within
the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the blood-thirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbors—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders,
were a literal fact instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is
my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of
political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it
were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of
victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see
occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom
ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell!
The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if
the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the
accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested
themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was
requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and
vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a
person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and,
although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In
the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years;
a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too
long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no
advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself from
toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me.
Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late
Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized by the Whigs
as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs—his tendency
to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may
meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren
of the same household must diverge from one another—had sometimes
made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no
longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as
settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to
be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been
content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many
worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then
to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy
of a friendly one.
Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or
two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state,
like Irving’s Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be
buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative
self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his
shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that
everything was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper,
and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was
again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life,
and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the
story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of
cheerfulness in the writer’s mind; for he was happier, while straying
through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since
he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which
contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and
the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines of such antique
date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty
again.[1] Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the
whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED
SURVEYOR; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too
autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will
readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave.
Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness
to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!
[Footnote 1: At the time of writing this article the author
intended to publish, along with “The Scarlet Letter,” several
shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought
advisable to defer.]
The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector,—who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived
forever,—he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with
him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed
and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now
flung aside forever. The merchants,—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard,
Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,—these, and many other names, which had
such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the
world,—how little time has it required to disconnect me from them
all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my
old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist
brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real
earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary
inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes,
and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it
ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.
My good towns-people will not much regret me; for—though it has been
as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this
abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers—_there_ has never
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in
order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst
other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do
just as well without me.
It may be, however,—O, transporting and triumphant thought!—that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come,
among the sites memorable in the town’s history, shall point out the
locality of THE TOWN PUMP!
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The Prison Door]
[Illustration: Vignette,—Wild Rose]
THE SCARLET LETTER.
I.
THE PRISON-DOOR.
[Illustration]
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray,
steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the
door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a
prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that
the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere
in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out
the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his
grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is,
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town,
the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of
its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New
World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known
a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the
wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with
burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which
evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early
borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side
of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally
overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for
believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann
Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us
to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our
narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal,
we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and
present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some
sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II.
THE MARKET-PLACE.
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer
morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty
large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes
intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other
population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the
grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good
people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have
betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted
culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed
the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably
be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful
child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to
be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a
Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the
town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water
had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into
the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old
Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to
die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same
solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a
people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in
whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest
and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable
and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a
transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On
the other hand, a penalty, which, in our days, would infer a degree of
mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as
stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in
the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways,
and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into
the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well
as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of
old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for,
throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has
transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer
beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less
force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing
about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the
period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and
the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit
more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright
morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed
busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off
island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of
New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle
us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume
of tone.
“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece
of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women,
being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the
handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye,
gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are
now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence
as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!”
“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her
godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal
should have come upon his congregation.”
“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful
overmuch,—that is a truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the
very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester
Prynne’s forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant
me. But she,—the naughty baggage,—little will she care what they
put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with
a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets
as brave as ever!”
“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by
the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be
always in her heart.”
[Illustration: The Gossips]
“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her
gown, or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest
as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This
woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not
law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the
statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect,
thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!”
“Mercy on us, goodwife,” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no
virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the
gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips! for the
lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne
herself.”
The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in
the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim
and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and
his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and
represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic
code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and
closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official
staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young
woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural
dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if
by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some
three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the
too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought
it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other
darksome apartment of the prison.
When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the
infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly
affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which
was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely
judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide
another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and
yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her towns-people and neighbors. On the breast of her gown,
in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and
fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so
artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance
of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration
to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in
accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was
allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large
scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the
sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from
regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the
impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was
lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those
days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the
delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized
as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more
lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she
issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had
expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were
astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out,
and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was
enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was
something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she
had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after
her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the
desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque
peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were,
transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been
familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if
they beheld her for the first time,—was that SCARLET LETTER, so
fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the
effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with
humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of
her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen
hussy, contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but
to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out
of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”
“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “if
we stripped Madam Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as
for the red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow
a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one!”
“O, peace, neighbors, peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do
not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she
has felt it in her heart.”
The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.
“Make way, good people, make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open
a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man,
woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this
time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of
the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!
Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the
market-place!”
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded
by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of
stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth
towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and
curious school-boys, understanding little of the matter in hand,
except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress,
turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the
winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast.
It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the
market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might
be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanor
was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those
that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the
street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however,
there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer
should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present
torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a
serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this
portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western
extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of
Boston’s earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which
now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and
traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as
effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was
the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the
platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that
instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in
its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very
ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance
of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our
common nature,—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,—no
outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for
shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester
Prynne’s instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her
sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform,
but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of
the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic
of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of
wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at
about the height of a man’s shoulders above the street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have
seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien,
and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image
of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with
one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed,
but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood,
whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of
deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such
effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty,
and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest
the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society
shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at
it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed
beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her
death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity,
but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would
find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had
there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must
have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no
less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a
judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat or
stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the
platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the
spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and
office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal
sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the
crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as
best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting
eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was
almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature,
she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs
of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but
there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the
popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid
countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the
object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,—each man,
each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their
individual parts,—Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a
bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it
was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs
shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the
scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the
most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped
and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was
preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this
roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western
wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the
brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences the most trifling
and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came
swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever
was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as
another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.
Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve
itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the
cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view
that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had
been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable
eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her
paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken
aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the
portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with
its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the
old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of
heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and
which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a
gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own
face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior
of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There
she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a
pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the
lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet
those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it
was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the
study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to
recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher
than the right. Next rose before her, in memory’s picture-gallery, the
intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge
cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in
architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her,
still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but
feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a
crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back
the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the
towns-people assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester
Prynne,—yes, at herself,—who stood on the scaffold of the pillory,
an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically
embroidered with gold-thread, upon her bosom!
[Illustration: “Standing on the Miserable Eminence”]
Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast,
that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet
letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that
the infant and the shame were real. Yes!—these were her
realities,—all else had vanished!
[Illustration]
III.
THE RECOGNITION.
From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which
irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native
garb, was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent
visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have
attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less
would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By
the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him,
stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage
costume.
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could
hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his
features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it
could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by
unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of
his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavored to conceal or abate the
peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of
this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of
the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a
force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother
did not seem to hear it.
At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,
the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly, at
first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom
external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear
relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look
became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across
his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one
little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His
face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a
single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a
brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally
subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of
Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to
recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture
with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.
Then, touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he
addressed him, in a formal and courteous manner.
“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is
she here set up to public shame?”
“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage
companion, “else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester
Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I
promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.”
“You say truly,” replied the other. “I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by
sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk,
to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be
redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell
me of Hester Prynne’s,—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s
offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”
“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find
yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and
punished in the sight of rulers and people; as here in our godly New
England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain
learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam,
whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in
his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his
wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary
affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman
has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this
learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being
left to her own misguidance—”
“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger, with a bitter smile.
“So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his
books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father of yonder
babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which
Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?”
“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel
who shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madam
Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid
their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands
looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that
God sees him.”
“The learned man,” observed the stranger, with another smile, “should
come himself, to look into the mystery.”
“It behooves him well, if he be still in life,” responded the
townsman. “Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking
themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was
strongly tempted to her fall,—and that, moreover, as is most likely,
her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,—they have not been bold
to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The
penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of
heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three
hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the
remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her
bosom.”
“A wise sentence!” remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his head.
“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious
letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that
the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the
scaffold by her side. But he will be known!—he will be known!—he
will be known!”
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and, whispering a
few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through
the crowd.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,
still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger; so fixed a gaze, that,
at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible
world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview,
perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she
now did, with the hot, mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and
lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast;
with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth
as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen
only in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a
home, or beneath a matronly veil, at church. Dreadful as it was, she
was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand
witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and
her, than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She fled for
refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment
when its protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these
thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her, until it had repeated
her name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the
whole multitude.
“Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” said the voice.
It has already been noticed, that directly over the platform on which
Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended
to the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont
to be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the
ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here,
to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham
himself, with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a
guard of honor. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a
gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his
wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a
community, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state
of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and
tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age;
accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was
surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a
period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness
of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.
But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to
select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be
less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and
disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid
aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed
conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the
larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes
towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled.
The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and
famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,
like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of
kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less
carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth,
rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he
stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while
his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were
winking, like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated
sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see
prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of
those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle
with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.
“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young
brother here, under whose preaching of the word you have been
privileged to sit,”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of
a pale young man beside him,—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this
godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven,
and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the
people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing
your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what
arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might
prevail over your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no
longer hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But
he opposes to me (with a young man’s over-softness, albeit wise beyond
his years), that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force
her to lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in
presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him,
the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of
it forth. What say you to it, once again, Brother Dimmesdale? Must it
be thou, or I, that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?”
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport,
speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect
towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed.
“Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsibility of this woman’s
soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her
to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one
of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the
age into our wild forest-land. His eloquence and religious fervor had
already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a
person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending
brow, large brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he
forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both
nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint.
Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments,
there was an air about this young minister,—an apprehensive, a
startled, a half-frightened look,—as of a being who felt himself
quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and
could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far
as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus
kept himself simple and childlike; coming forth, when occasion was,
with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as
many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.
Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor
had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in
the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred
even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the
blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.
“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to
her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to
thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it
seemed, and then came forward.
“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and
seest the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be
for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be
made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name
of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any
mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though
he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee,
on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt
him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath
granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an
open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take
heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to
grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now
presented to thy lips!”
The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and
broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the
direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts,
and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor
baby, at Hester’s bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it
directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up
its little arms, with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So
powerful seemed the minister’s appeal, that the people could not
believe but that Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty name; or
else that the guilty one himself, in whatever high or lowly place he
stood, would be drawn forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and
compelled to ascend to the scaffold.
Hester shook her head.
“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the
Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath
been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou
hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to
take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”
“Never!” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into
the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply
branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his
agony, as well as mine!”
“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding
from the crowd about the scaffold. “Speak; and give your child a
father!”
“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. “And my
child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly
one!”
“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his
appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength
and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”
[Illustration: “She was led back to Prison”]
Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the
elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,
addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches,
but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly
did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his
periods were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new
terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue
from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept
her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of
weary indifference. She had borne, that morning, all that nature could
endure; and as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from
too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself
beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal
life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher
thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant,
during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its
wailings and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed
scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanor,
she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within
its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered, by those who peered after
her, that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark
passage-way of the interior.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV.
THE INTERVIEW.
After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a
state of nervous excitement that demanded constant watchfulness, lest
she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied
mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible
to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment,
Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He
described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical
science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the
forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional
assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for
the child; who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed
to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair,
which pervaded the mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of
pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony
which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.
Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment appeared that
individual, of singular aspect, whose presence in the crowd had been
of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was
lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most
convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the
magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting
his ransom. His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer,
after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the
comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to
moan.
“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the
practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in
your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be
more amenable to just authority than you may have found her
heretofore.”
“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett,
“I shall own you for a man of skill indeed! Verily, the woman hath
been like a possessed one; and there lacks little, that I should take
in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”
The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of
the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his
demeanor change, when the withdrawal of the prison-keeper left him
face to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the
crowd, had intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His
first care was given to the child; whose cries, indeed, as she lay
writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to
postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He examined
the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case,
which he took from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical
preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of water.
“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a
year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of
simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the
medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours,—she is none of
mine,—neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father’s.
Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”
Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with
strongly marked apprehension into his face.
“Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.
“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half
soothingly. “What should ail me, to harm this misbegotten and
miserable babe? The medicine is potent for good; and were it my
child,—yea, mine own, as well as thine!—I could do no better for
it.”
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of
mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the
draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge.
The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings
gradually ceased; and, in a few moments, as is the custom of young
children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy
slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next
bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny he
felt her pulse, looked into her eyes,—a gaze that made her heart
shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and
cold,—and, finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to
mingle another draught.
“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many
new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them,—a recipe that
an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were
as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless
conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and
heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous
sea.”
He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest
look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt
and questioning, as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at
her slumbering child.
“I have thought of death,” said she,—“have wished for it,—would even
have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for
anything. Yet if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere
thou beholdest me quaff it. See! It is even now at my lips.”
“Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost
thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so
shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do
better for my object than to let thee live,—than to give thee
medicines against all harm and peril of life,—so that this burning
shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long
forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch
into Hester’s breast, as if it had been red-hot. He noticed her
involuntary gesture, and smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy
doom with thee, in the eyes of men and women,—in the eyes of him whom
thou didst call thy husband,—in the eyes of yonder child! And, that
thou mayest live, take off this draught.”
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the
cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed
where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the
room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but
tremble at these preparations; for she felt that—having now done all
that humanity or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty,
impelled him to do, for the relief of physical suffering—he was next
to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably
injured.
“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen
into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of
infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was
my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the bookworm of
great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years
to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,—what had I to do with youth
and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I
delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil
physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If
sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all
this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal
forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first
object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a
statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we
came down the old church steps together, a married pair, I might have
beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our
path!”
“Thou knowest,” said Hester,—for, depressed as she was, she could not
endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame,—“thou knowest
that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.”
“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that
epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so
cheerless! My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but
lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle
one! It seemed not so wild a dream,—old as I was, and sombre as I
was, and misshapen as I was,—that the simple bliss, which is
scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be
mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost
chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made
there!”
“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.
“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong,
when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation
with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and
philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.
Between thee and me the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the
man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”
“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.
“That thou shalt never know!”
“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there
are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth,
in the invisible sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man
who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a
mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude.
Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even
as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy
heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come
to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this
man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in
alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I
shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and
unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!”
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that
Hester Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he
should read the secret there at once.
“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he,
with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He
bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but
I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I
shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own
loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine
that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his
fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let
him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be
mine!”
“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But
thy words interpret thee as a terror!”
“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,”
continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.
Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me.
Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me husband!
Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for,
elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a
woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest
ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of
right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home
is where thou art, and where he is. But betray me not!”
[Illustration: “The Eyes of the wrinkled Scholar glowed”]
“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, she
hardly knew why, from this secret bond. “Why not announce thyself
openly, and cast me off at once?”
“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonor
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,
therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of
whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign,
by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest
of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his
life, will be in my hands. Beware!”
“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.
“Swear it!” rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was
hereafter to be named, “I leave thee alone; alone with thy infant, and
the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to
wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and
hideous dreams?”
“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will
prove the ruin of my soul?”
“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”
[Illustration]
V.
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE.
Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door
was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling
on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no
other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps
there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from
the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle
that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at
which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the
scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and
insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,
therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength
that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that
condemned her—a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support,
as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up, through
the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended
walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom; and she must either
sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,
or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help
her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial
with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own
trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to
be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with
the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never
to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile
up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up
her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the
young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter
flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at
her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,—at her,
who had once been innocent,—as the figure, the body, the reality of
sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would
be her only monument.
It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her,—kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the
Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure,—free to return to her
birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her
character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if
emerging into another state of being,—and having also the passes of
the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her
nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life
were alien from the law that had condemned her,—it may seem
marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home,
where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there
is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has
the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to
linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more
irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her
ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as
if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had
converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim
and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long
home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England,
where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her
mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her,
in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and
galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too,—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret
from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart,
like a serpent from its hole,—it might be that another feeling kept
her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt,
there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in
a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before
the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a
joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the
tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and
laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized,
and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the
face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled
herself to believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive
for continuing a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her
guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so,
perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her
soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more
saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
[Illustration: The Lonesome Dwelling]
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any
other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been
built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it
was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put
it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the
habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin
of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of
scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much
conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some
object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed.
In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she
possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an
inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her
infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself
to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman
should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep
nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or
standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or coming
forth along the pathway that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet
letter on her breast, would scamper off with a strange, contagious
fear.
Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who
dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded
comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her
thriving infant and herself. It was the art—then, as now, almost the
only one within a woman’s grasp—of needlework. She bore on her
breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her
delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might
gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual
adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here,
indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the
Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the
finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age,
demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not
fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast
behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense
with. Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a
new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of
policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a
sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought
bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to
the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were
readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while
sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the
dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth
and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and
characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply.
Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still
another possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so
miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a
fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,
on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester
really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is
certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many
hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,
chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and
state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her
needlework was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it
on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s
little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the
coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single
instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil
which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception
indicated the ever-relentless rigor with which society frowned upon
her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple
abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials
and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet
letter,—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the
other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say,
a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy
charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which
appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it
hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might
readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in
making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an
idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a
real sacrifice of enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude
handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental
characteristic,—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in
the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all
the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive
a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil
of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of
expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all
other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience
with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine
and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might
be deeply wrong, beneath.
In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the
world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it
could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her,
more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow
of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was
nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture,
every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in
contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as
much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with
the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human
kind. She stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them,
like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor
mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting
its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.
These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be
the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not
an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well,
and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before
her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch
upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she
sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand
that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated rank,
likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were
accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes
through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a
subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser
expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a
rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long
and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of
crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again
subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient,—a martyr,
indeed,—but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of
her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly
twist themselves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the
innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for
her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal.
Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that
brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor,
sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath
smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself
the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible
in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never
any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to
pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the
utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own
minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips
that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion
of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no
deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story
among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the
wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in
the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet
letter,—and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into
Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet
always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then,
again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its
cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in
short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human
eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the
contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.
[Illustration: Lonely Footsteps]
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she
felt an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to
give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next
instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;
for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned
alone?
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer
moral and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with
those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was
outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester,—if
altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted,—she
felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a
new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing,
that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other
hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus
made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers
of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman,
as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but
a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet
letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or,
must she receive those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as
truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so
awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked
her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought
it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would
give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or
magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with
angels. “What evil thing is at hand?” would Hester say to herself.
Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the
scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic
sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the
sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all
tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That
unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the burning shame on Hester
Prynne’s,—what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric
thrill would give her warning,—“Behold, Hester, here is a
companion!”—and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young
maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly
averted with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity
were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in
youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is
ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that
all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s
hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no
fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story
about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a
terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet
cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal
fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne
walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared
Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the
rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VI.
PEARL.
[Illustration]
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature,
whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of
Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance
of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she
watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day more
brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over
the tiny features of this child! Her Pearl!—For so had Hester called
her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the
calm, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the
comparison. But she named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great
price,—purchased with all she had,—her mother’s only treasure! How
strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter,
which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy
could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct
consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely
child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her
parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally
a blessed soul in heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne
less with hope than apprehension. She knew that her deed had been
evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be
good. Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child’s expanding
nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity, that
should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being.
Certainly, there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,
the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to
have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the
world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace
which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire,
however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very
garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in
rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better
understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be
procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the
arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before
the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure, when thus
arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl’s own proper beauty,
shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a
paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around
her, on the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and
soiled with the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as
perfect. Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety;
in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full
scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the
pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there
was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost;
and if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she
would have ceased to be herself,—it would have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared
to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears
deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into
which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In
giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was
a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all
in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the
point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be
discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and
even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself
had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her
soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material
of earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through
which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral
life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep
stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and
the untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the
warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl.
She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness
of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and
despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated
by the morning radiance of a young child’s disposition, but later in
the day of earthly existence might be prolific of the storm and
whirlwind.
The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid
kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application
of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in
the way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen
for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,
nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of
erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own
errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but
strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her
charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles
and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any
calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside,
and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical
compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As
to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or
heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while
Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,
that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist,
persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable,
so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a
wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such
moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy
sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while
upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever
that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested
her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were
hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that
comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither. Beholding it,
Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,—to pursue the
little elf in the flight which she invariably began,—to snatch her to
her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses,—not so much from
overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood,
and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s laugh, when she was caught,
though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than
before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so
dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into
passionate tears. Then, perhaps,—for there was no foreseeing how it
might affect her,—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and
harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of
discontent. Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before,
like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this
more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and
sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on
proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly
safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness; it passed, as
suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt
like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the
process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should
control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real
comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was
sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;
until—perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath
her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!
How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed!—did Pearl arrive at an
age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother’s
ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would
it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like
voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have
distinguished and unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the
entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never
be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,
emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with
which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had
drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in
short, of her position in respect to other children. Never, since her
release from prison, had Hester met the public gaze without her. In
all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe
in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her
mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along
at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the
children of the settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at
the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashion
as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church,
perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham-fight
with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative
witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make
acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children
gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively
terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with
shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because
they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown
tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant
brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and
child; and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not
unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the
sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be
supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce
temper had a kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because
there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of
the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child’s
manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again,
a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this
enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of
Hester’s heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle
of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed
to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester
Prynne before Pearl’s birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by
the softening influences of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a
wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth
from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand
objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The
unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the
puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward
change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the
stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of
imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees,
aged, black and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy
utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as
Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children,
whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was
wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her
intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing,
always in a state of preternatural activity,—soon sinking down, as if
exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by
other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as
the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise
of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there
might be little more than was observable in other children of bright
faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was
thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The
singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded
all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a
friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth,
whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to
battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what depth of sorrow to a
mother, who felt in her own heart the cause!—to observe, in one so
young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a
training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the
contest that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,
and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but
which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan,—“O
Father in Heaven,—if Thou art still my Father,—what is this being
which I have brought into the world!” And Pearl, overhearing the
ejaculation, or aware, through some more subtile channel, of those
throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon
her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.
[Illustration: A touch of Pearl’s baby-hand]
One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The
very first thing which she had noticed in her life was—what?—not the
mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint,
embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards,
and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no
means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware
was—shall we say it?—the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom! One day,
as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant’s eyes had been
caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and,
putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not
doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a
much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch
the fatal token, instinctively endeavoring to tear it away; so
infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s
baby-hand. Again, as if her mother’s agonized gesture were meant only
to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and
smile! From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had
never felt a moment’s safety; not a moment’s calm enjoyment of her.
Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze
might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it
would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always
with that peculiar smile, and odd expression of the eyes.
Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes, while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of
doing; and, suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled
hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she fancied that
she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face, in the
small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of
smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had
known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in
them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just
then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been
tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of
wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom;
dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet
letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her
clasped hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling
that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain,
she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly
into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers,
almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast
with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew
how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the
child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing
image of a fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother
so imagined it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.
“O, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.
But, while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down,
with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak
might be to fly up the chimney.
“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment,
with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful
intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not
acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now
reveal herself.
“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.
“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother,
half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came
over her, in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what
thou art, and who sent thee hither.”
“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and
pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”
“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of
the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or
because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger,
and touched the scarlet letter.
“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly
Father!”
“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,
suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into this world. He sent even me,
thy mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish
child, whence didst thou come?”
“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing,
and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”
But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the
talk of the neighboring towns-people; who, seeking vainly elsewhere
for the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes,
had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring; such as,
ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth,
through the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and
wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish
enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only
child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New
England Puritans.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VII.
THE GOVERNOR’S HALL.
[Illustration]
Hester Prynne went, one day, to the mansion of Governor Bellingham,
with a pair of gloves, which she had fringed and embroidered to his
order, and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for,
though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler
to descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an
honorable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview
with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the
settlement. It had reached her ears, that there was a design on the
part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid
order of principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her
child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon
origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian
interest in the mother’s soul required them to remove such a
stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were
really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the
elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the
fairer prospect of these advantages, by being transferred to wiser and
better guardianship than Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the
design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It
may appear singular, and indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an
affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been referred to
no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town, should
then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen
of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however,
matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic
weight, than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed
up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period
was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute
concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce and
bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in
an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore,—but so conscious of her own right that it
seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one side,
and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the
other,—Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little
Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run
lightly along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion, from
morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than
that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than
necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as
imperious to be set down again, and frisked onward before Hester on
the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have
spoken of Pearl’s rich and luxuriant beauty; a beauty that shone with
deep and vivid tints; a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity
both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and
which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire
in her and throughout her; she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a
passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had
allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play;
arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly
embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread. So much
strength of coloring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to
cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty,
and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced
upon the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the
child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded
the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon
her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet
letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy
were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions
assumed its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing
many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the
object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But,
in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in
consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to
represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,—or what passed
for play with those sombre little urchins,—and spake gravely one to
another:—
“Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running
along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!”
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening
gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put
them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an
infant pestilence,—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel
of judgment,—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising
generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of
sound, which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake
within them. The victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her
mother, and looked up, smiling, into her face.
Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which
there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns;
now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the
many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that
have happened, and passed away, within their dusky chambers. Then,
however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior,
and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a
human habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed,
a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully
intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front
of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been
flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have
befitted Aladdin’s palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old
Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly
cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the
age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had
now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times.
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and
dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine
should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.
“No, my little Pearl!” said her mother. “Thou must gather thine own
sunshine. I have none to give thee!”
They approached the door; which was of an arched form, and flanked on
each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of
which were lattice-windows, with wooden shutters to close over them at
need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne
gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor’s
bond-servants; a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave.
During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much
a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf
wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men of
that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England.
“Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?” inquired Hester.
“Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes
at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had
never before seen. “Yea, his honorable worship is within. But he hath
a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see
his worship now.”
“Nevertheless, I will enter,” answered Hester Prynne, and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the
glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land,
offered no opposition.
So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of
entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his
building-materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of
social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after
the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here,
then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the
whole depth of the house, and forming a medium of general
communication, more or less directly, with all the other apartments.
At one extremity, this spacious room was lighted by the windows of the
two towers, which formed a small recess on either side of the portal.
At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more
powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall-windows which we
read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned
seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the
Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as,
in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be
turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted
of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved
with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste;
the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and
heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor’s paternal home. On
the table—in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had
not been left behind—stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of
which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the
frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of
the Bellingham lineage, some with armor on their breasts, and others
with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterized by the
sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if
they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies,
and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits
and enjoy
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