The Scarlet Letter

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.

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.

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.

There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected
with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and
who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such
solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother.

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 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.

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.

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.

The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.

If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by ...

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.

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?"

All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very
man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of
vengeance!

Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter
that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their
nature was, tenaciously adhered.

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.

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.

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.

If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by ...

"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his
breast, as if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain.

He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from
any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous
temperament.--"But,

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.

"What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and
miserable babe?

His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a
certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put
his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness,
indicative of pain.

"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.

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.

All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth.

For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable
the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took
long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various
walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn
wind-anthem among the tree-tops.

"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her
antics.

His gestures, his gait, his
grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself.

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.

At all events,
the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had
aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an
aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment
were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he could
have produced in the shape of a diploma.

"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled;
"but thy words interpret thee as a terror!"

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 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.

THE LEECH

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will
remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had
resolved should never more be spoken.

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.

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.

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.

On the other side of the
house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and
laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon
even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals,
which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose.

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.

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.

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.

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

Old Governor
Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James' ruff
fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams
about the glorified saints.

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.

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.

I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed 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.

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.

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 it...

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.

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.

A mystic
shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He himself, on the
other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that
if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because
of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on
earth.

The whole tribe of
decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view
with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.

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.

"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate.

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.

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this
scheme.

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.

Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went
pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as
if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to
and fro.

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.

Prithee, young one, who art
thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this
strange fashion?

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as
we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of
Providence had done all this for the purpose--besought in so
many public and domestic and secret prayers--of restoring the
young minister to health.

"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the
dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman.

"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!"

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.

"Mine was the first
wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and
unnatural relation with my decay.

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.

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.

And may she feel,
too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was
meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive,
and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan
might else have sought to plunge her!

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.

"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, look
you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish
adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"

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.

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 diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul.

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, 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.

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.

Pearl, that wild
and flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his
hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a
caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother,
who was looking on, asked herself--"Is that my Pearl?"

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.

Dost know thy
catechism?

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.

It mattered little
for his object, whether celestial or from what other region.

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!"

But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so
indubitably be drawn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There will be a merry company in the
forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely
Hester Prynne should make one."

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.

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and
whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made
their way through the crowd.

"Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!" whispered their youngest
companion; "do not let her hear you!

What can thy silence do for him, except it
tempt him--yea, compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin?

Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that
moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how
Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.

He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.

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.

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.

In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the
higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised,
and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the
intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve
art enough to comprise all of life within itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doomed by his own choice,
therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the
life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself
only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very
man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

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.

If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by silence...

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.

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.

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her
arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a
fierce expression.

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.

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.

Unknown to
all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her
silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind,
and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of
life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the
ocean, whither rumour had long ago consigned him.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

If they would serve
their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and
reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential
self-abasement!

For her kindred, should the tidings ever
reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there
remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would
not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion
with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

Truly, as I sought to
convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and
not in the showing of it forth.

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.

"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I
crave pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this
needful plainness of my speech.

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.

"For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the
creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and
made of no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and
holy love?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The minister might stand there, if it so
pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without
other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep
into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog
his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis,
and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even
while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet
constrained often to avail themselves.

She knew that her deed had been evil; she could
have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good.

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.

Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous
impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?

So the minister, and the physician with
him, withdrew again within the limits of what their Church
defined as orthodox.

The earliest
riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as
he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor.

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.

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?

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.

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.

So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom,
delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and
probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker
in a dark cavern.

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.

The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to
be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the
Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet,
in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the
scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.

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.

Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its
present depravity, and future destiny!

"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.

After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature.

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.

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.

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 expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but
was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken,
seemed not despondent of a favourable result.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul.

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.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion
that the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of
special sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was
haunted either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary, in the
guise of old Roger Chillingworth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and
turning over many precious materials, in the shape of high
aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls,
pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and
study, and illuminated by revelation--all of which invaluable
gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker--he would
turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another
point.

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.

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.

On the other side of the
house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and
laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon
even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals,
which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose.

Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the
faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through
the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.

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.

The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that
Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and
closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably
drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

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.

The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy
slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a
dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that
period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely
cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air.

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.

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.

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.

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of
Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were
lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the
minister's life-tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and
attached physician.

It was as if she had
been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be
permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself
without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.

Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that
moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how
Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.

I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed 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.

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 soon proved its efficacy, and
redeemed the leech's pledge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.

He looked now
more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the
scene of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his
failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark
eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.

The very ideal of ignominy
was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and
iron.

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.

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 gristly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.

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 gristly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.

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.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion
that the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of
special sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was
haunted either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary, in the
guise of old Roger Chillingworth.

Baby-linen--for babies then wore
robes of state--afforded still another possibility of toil and
emolument.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,"
continued the scholar.

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.

Hast thou enticed me into a bond that
will prove the ruin of my soul?"

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes
above enumerated.

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.

But, up
to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain.

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.

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.

It kept him down on a level with the
lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the
angels might else have listened to and answered!

Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of
intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated
minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human
thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every topic of
ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character;
they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal
to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness
into h...

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.

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.

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.

He examined the
infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case,
which he took from beneath his dress.

"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?

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the
outward forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival,
had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.

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 behoves you; therefore,
to exhort her to repentance and to confession, as a proof and
consequence thereof."

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.

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.

An unvaried pall of
cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon.

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.

To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!

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.

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
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.

"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the
Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the
townsman.

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.

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.

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.

Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her
little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind.

"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind.

The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.

I felt no love,
nor feigned any."

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 h...

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.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a
large scale.

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.

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.

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.

A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another.

She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which
society frowned upon her sin.

The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

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.

I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.

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

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.

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.

Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal
of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As at the waving of a magician's
wand, up rose a grisly phantom--up rose a thousand phantoms--in
many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round
about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his
breast!

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.

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?

Yet Hester was
hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness: it
passed as suddenly as it came.

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.

"Art thou like the Black Man that haunts
the forest round about us?

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!"

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.

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.

It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of
heaven.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the
child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of
those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of
immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest.

To the untrue man, the whole
universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing
within his grasp.

It
showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light.

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 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.

After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature.

There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who
had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to
having seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the
affair of Overbury.

There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who
had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to
having seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the
affair of Overbury.

His gestures, his gait, his
grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself.

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.

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.

The elders, the
deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens of
Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he should
make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill.

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.

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.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye
and heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith,
beheld there the appearance of an immense letter--the letter
A--marked out in lines of dull red light.

All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by
inalienable right, out of Hester's heart.

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

If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by silence...

Two or three individuals hinted that the man
of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical
attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage
priests, who were universally acknowledged to be powerful
enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their
skill in the black art.

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.

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.

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him.

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.

Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth
who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of
want.

The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which
society frowned upon her sin.

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.

His form
grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a
certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put
his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness,
indicative of pain.

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.

To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!

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.

Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world.

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.

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.

In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought
and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork
there.

But
then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to
inflict.

He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.

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.

All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by
inalienable right, out of Hester's heart.

In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose
sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual
intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to
his peace had thrust itself into relation with him.

But that perversity, which all children have
more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold
portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough
possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to speak
words amiss.

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 it...

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?

Were it not, thinkest thou, for
thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken
out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly,
and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth?

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.

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.

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 h...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled;
"but thy words interpret thee as a terror!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by ...

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.

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.

Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill
to follow it up.

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.

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.

"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as
waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or
unseasonable.

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.

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.

A mockery at which
angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering
laughter!

I longed to kindle one!

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.

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a
dismal labyrinth of doubt.

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 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved
the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.

The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to
be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the
Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet,
in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the
scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.

The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled--nay, almost
laughed at them--and then wondered if he was going mad.

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.

They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those
self-condemning words.

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.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to
the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred
office.

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.

The very ideal of ignominy
was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and
iron.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

It appeared to contain
medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of
water.

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.

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.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as
so many revelations from a supernatural source.

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.

He now dug into the
poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,
rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of
a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely
to find nothing save mortality and corruption.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"It is of
moment to her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor
says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is.

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.

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.

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.

Doomed by his own choice,
therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the
life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself
only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very
man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

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.

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.

"I feared the woman
had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"

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.

It
was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was
wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales
from books.

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life.

But she--the naughty baggage--little will
she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown!

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.

His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence,
dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting from the
nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily
heightened to the miraculous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"The learned man," observed the stranger with another smile,
"should come himself to look into the mystery."

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.

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.

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.

"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed
to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house.

Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven
promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what
is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a
providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival.

The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly
for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up
out of a buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?"

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.

Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to
death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne
had stood!

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

The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy,
was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him
into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been
nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.

"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."

But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins
and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was
already an illustration of the young minister's argument against
sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of
her frailty.

"Thou hast kept the secret of thy
paramour.

By those best acquainted with his habits, the
paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his
too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of
parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of
which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the
grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his
spiritual lamp.

"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the
practitioner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit
at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl.

"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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the
child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of
those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of
immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest.

The point hath been weightily
discussed, whether we, that are of authority and influence, do
well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul,
such as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who
hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this world.

It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his,
that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities
there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the
spirit's joy and nutriment.

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.

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.

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.

It soon proved its efficacy, and
redeemed the leech's pledge.

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.

"What little bird of
scarlet plumage may this be?

And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a
relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one
who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his own
polluted breath.

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.

The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything
else in the New World.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The medicine is potent for good, and were it my
child--yea, mine own, as well as thine!

"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the
practitioner.

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.

In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim.

In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim.

For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for
such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that
the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.

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.

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.

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.

So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom,
delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and
probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker
in a dark cavern.

"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly,
proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give
your child a father!"

"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly,
proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give
your child a father!"

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.

He
marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back
the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was
his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly
sought.

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.

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.

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.

With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to
health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging
his feeble existence to that hour.

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.

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.

Their love for man, their zeal for
God's service--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in
their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has
unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a hellish
breed within them.

These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by
the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his church,
who, to use their own phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of
rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out.

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of
the Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window,
together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which
she had passed in coming hither.

Thou mayest cover up
thy secret from the prying multitude.

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.

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.

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.

Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think
again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it.

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.

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.

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a
dismal labyrinth of doubt.

Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill
to follow it up.

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic
quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as
belonging.

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!

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.

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.

Let me ask as your friend, as
one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical
well being, hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly
laid open and recounted to me?"

It was meant, doubtless, the
mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture
to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an
ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy!

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.

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.

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.

Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.

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.

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.

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.

Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing
human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly
saint!

"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence.

"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?

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.

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.

To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God gave her
the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its
nature and requirements--both seemingly so peculiar--which no
other mortal being can possess.

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 h...

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a
dismal labyrinth of doubt.

He now drew back with a long respiration.

"It behoves him well if he be still in life," responded the
townsman.

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.

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.

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 it...

Not the less he is mine,"
resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one
with him.

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.

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.

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.

She was terror-
stricken by the revelations that were thus made.

Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went
pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as
if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to
and fro.

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.

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.

"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the
Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the
townsman.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim.

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.

Doomed by his own choice,
therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the
life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself
only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very
man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

They were, doubtless, good men, just and
sage.

Meagre, indeed,
and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for,
from such bystanders, at the scaffold.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As he
spoke, he laid his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter, which
forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's breast, as if it had
been red hot.

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.

By those best acquainted with his habits, the
paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his
too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of
parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of
which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the
grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his
spiritual lamp.

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.

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.

"And
my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an
earthly one!"

Not seldom she would
laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and
unintelligent of human sorrow.

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.

It may be true that, to a sensitive observer,
there was some thing exquisitely painful in it.

It
was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was
wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales
from books.

But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so
indubitably be drawn.

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.

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.

Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare.

Would it be beyond a
philosopher's research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that
child's nature, and, from it make a mould, to give a shrewd
guess at the father?"

Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous
impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It had the effect of
a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity,
and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It
was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was
wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales
from books.

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.

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.

After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature.

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.

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.

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature.

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.

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.

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.

But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins
and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was
already an illustration of the young minister's argument against
sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of
her frailty.

Thou must not talk so!" answered the
mother, suppressing a groan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with
his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the
disorder is a strange one; not so much in itself nor as
outwardly manifested,--in so far, at least as the symptoms have
been laid open to my observation.

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.

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.

"I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my
little Pearl.

It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress
Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die
upon the gallows.

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.

But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy
passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea."

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.

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.

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.

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.

I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed 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.

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.

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

Moreover, at a proper season, the
tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to
meeting."

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.

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.

Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of
intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated
minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human
thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every topic of
ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character;
they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal
to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness
into h...

To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he
would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the
burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which
it was his doom to totter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Looking instinctively from the open
window--for it was summer-time--the minister beheld Hester
Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that
traversed the enclosure.

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.

But she named
the infant "Pearl," as being of great price--purchased with all
she had--her mother's only treasure!

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.

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.

"I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor
himself with water at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.

If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by ...

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.

"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in
an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but
standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked
minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a
sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit
hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily
frame.

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.

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.

Not seldom she would
laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and
unintelligent of human sorrow.

But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in
unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent
its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes
of sad, persuasive eloquence.

Not the less, however, though with a
tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of
looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of
intellect than those with which he habitually held converse.

Pearl, that wild
and flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his
hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a
caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother,
who was looking on, asked herself--"Is that my Pearl?"

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.

The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy,
was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him
into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been
nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.

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.

Little Pearl's unwonted mood
of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering
down the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question
whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the
magistrates have laid their heads together in vain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The
physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his
hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that
hitherto had always covered it even from the professional eye.

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?

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 the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis,
and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even
while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet
constrained often to avail themselves.

Then why--since the choice was with himself--should the
individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been the
most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate
his claim to an inheritance so little desirable?

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.

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.

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.

"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as
waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or
unseasonable.

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.

He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread,
and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a
man lies only half asleep--or, it may be, broad awake--with
purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the
apple of his eye.

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.

"Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!" whispered their youngest
companion; "do not let her hear you!

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.

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.

Madame Hester would have winced at
that, I warrant me.

She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.

An unvaried pall of
cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon.