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The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #33 · 499,588 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Scarlet Letter

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: June 1, 1992 [eBook #33]
                Most recently updated: May 13, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33

Credits: Dartmouth College


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCARLET LETTER ***




The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne


Contents

 THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
 THE SCARLET LETTER
 I. THE PRISON DOOR
 II. THE MARKET-PLACE
 III. THE RECOGNITION
 IV. THE INTERVIEW
 V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
 VI. PEARL
 VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL
 VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
 IX. THE LEECH
 X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
 XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
 XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL
 XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
 XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
 XV. HESTER AND PEARL
 XVI. A FOREST WALK
 XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
 XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
 XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
 XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
 XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
 XXII. THE PROCESSION
 XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
 XXIV. CONCLUSION




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 favoured 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 recognised 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 harbour, 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 eiderdown 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 ship-master, just in port, with his vessel’s papers
under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, 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, careworn
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
weathers—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 a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that
distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings
who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or
anything else but their own independent exertions. These old
gentlemen—seated, like Matthew at the receipt of custom, 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 grey 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 recognised,
honoured 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 hath 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 affection, 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 alms-house 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 stuck 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 earthly
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 dry old 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 recognise 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 grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of
story books! What kind of 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 grey-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 connexion 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 embedded. 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 the grave, another assuming, as
it were, his sentry-march along the main street—might still in my
little day be seen and recognised in the old town. Nevertheless, this
very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion, 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 re-planted, for
too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My
children have had other birth-places, 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 halfpenny, 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 tossed on every sea,
and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast, 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 bed-ridden,
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 labours, 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
walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the 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 waggon-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 recognise
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 favourable 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 humour,
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 grey, 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
memory with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of
their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’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 which 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 savour of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils. There were
flavours 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 reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy
and sensual: a tenderloin 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 carcase, 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 honourable life.

The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score 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
crumpled 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 grey
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 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’s peal,
loud enough to awaken all of 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
demeanour 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—was 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 or 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 humour, 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 ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his 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,
valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, 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 mainspring 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 forth-with, 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, than 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 subtle 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 looked 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 been 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 make 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, 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
the office with me, and went out only a little later—would often engage
me in a discussion about one or the other of his favourite 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 blasoned 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 storey 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 labour 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 favour
of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port
of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered 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 labour off my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to 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 discovered
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, honour, 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.

When 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, as 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 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 splendour that shone so
dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog 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 hundredfold 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 have once 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 parlour, 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
book-case; the picture on the wall—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualised 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 upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer
light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, 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 moon-beams 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 marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous
colouring 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
today, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise 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 had 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 favourable 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 possesses 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 for ever 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 endeavoured 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 grey 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 bloodthirstiness 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
neighbours—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 was 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 recognised 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 political 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 honours 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. 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!

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 for
ever—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 for ever. The merchants—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton,
Kimball, Bertram, Hunt—these and many other names, which had such
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 townspeople 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—oh, 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.




THE SCARLET LETTER




I.
THE PRISON DOOR


A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
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 recognised 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, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that
had so early borne the black flower of civilised 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 symbolise some sweet moral blossom that
may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale
of human frailty and sorrow.




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
or vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s firewater 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 demeanour on
the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion
and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so
thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and 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 had transmitted to her child
a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter
physical frame, if not 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.
Madame 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.”

“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
acquaintance only with the grey 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 townspeople
and neighbours. 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 splendour 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
ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those
days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the
delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised
as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike,
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 some thing 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 Madame 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!”

“Oh, peace, neighbours—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, Madame
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
schoolboys, 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 demeanour 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 grey 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 bold 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 lamp-light 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, grey houses, the huge cathedrals,
and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of
a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion
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 townspeople 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.

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!




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 endeavoured 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 near 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 ago 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 favour, 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. “Madame
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 behoves 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 honour. 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
grey 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 behoves 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—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 fervour 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 labour. 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 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 recognised. “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!”

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
sympathise with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, 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.




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
demeanour 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 recognise 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 book-worm 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
philosophised 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 hand 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 honour, 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!”

“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 dishonour
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. Recognise 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!”




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 vigour 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. Tomorrow 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 honourable 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 birth-place,
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 colour 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,
unrecognised 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.

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 licence 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 labouring 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 needle-work. 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 characterised 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 labour as Hester Prynne could supply.
Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another
possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, not 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
needle-work 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 to embroider the white veil which was to cover
the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever
relentless vigour 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 may 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 mortal 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 succour
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; and 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 forebore to pray for 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 streets, 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 utterances 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 in 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.

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 rumour 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 rumour than our modern
incredulity may be inclined to admit.




VI.
PEARL


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 dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever 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
vigour, 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 co-exist 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 splendour 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 loving 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 labour thrown away to insist, persuade
or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so
malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was 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, unsympathising 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 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 fashions 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 the 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 a 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 offsprings 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.

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 endeavouring 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 agonised 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.

“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down
with the humoursome 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 the 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 neighbouring townspeople, 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.




VII.
THE GOVERNOR’S HALL


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
honourable 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 select men 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 let
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 in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of colouring,
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 spoke 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, the 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 customary garb of serving-men at 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 honourable 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 armour on their breasts, and others
with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised 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
enjoyments of living men.

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic,
but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful
armourer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came
over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget
and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all,
and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to
glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about
upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show,
but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the
Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of
Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the
exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into
a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler.

Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as
she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some
time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.

“Mother,” cried she, “I see you here. Look! Look!”

Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing to
the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was
represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be
greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she
seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upwards also, at a
similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the
elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small
physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made
Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child,
but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl’s shape.

“Come along, Pearl,” said she, drawing her away, “Come and look into
this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful
ones than we find in the woods.”

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the
hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with
closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt
at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished
as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in
a hard soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native
English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly
beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great
lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth
would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of
apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend
Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half
mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on
the back of a bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would
not be pacified.

“Hush, child—hush!” said her mother, earnestly. “Do not cry, dear
little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him.”

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons were
seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her
mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became
silent, not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and
mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of
those new personages.




VIII.
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER


Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap—such as elderly
gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic
privacy—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and
expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an
elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of
King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of
John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so
rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was
hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error
to suppose that our great forefathers—though accustomed to speak and
think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and
though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest
of duty—made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort,
or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never
taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose
beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham’s
shoulders, while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet
be naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The
old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a
long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable
things, and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in
his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne,
still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer
affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.

Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests—one, the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having
taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne’s
disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger
Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for two or three
years past had been settled in the town. It was understood that this
learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister,
whose health had severely suffered of late by his too unreserved
self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps,
and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself
close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne,
and partially concealed her.

“What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at
the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen the
like since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I was wont
to esteem it a high favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used
to be a swarm of these small apparitions in holiday time, and we called
them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my
hall?”

“Ay, indeed!” cried good old Mr. Wilson. “What little bird of scarlet
plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the
sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out
the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old
land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother
to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Ch

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