 19 Thou wilt lover dearly, repeated hest to Brynn, as she and the minister, that watching little girl, dost thou not think her beautiful, and see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn her. As she gathered pearls and diamonds and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid child, but I know whose brow she has. Dost thou know, Esther, said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile, that this dear child, dripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Me thought, oh, Esther, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it, that my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them. But she is mostly thine. No-no, not mostly, answered the mother, with a tender smile, a little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is, but how strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers in her hair. It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us. It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and watched pearls flow advance. Inora was visible of the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world these seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic in which was revealed the secret, lasso-darkly salt to eyed. All written in this symbol, all plainly manifest. Had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame, and pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil, what it might. How could they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea in whom they met, and what did well and mortally together thoughts like these and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define, through and all about the child as she came onward? Let us see nothing strange, no passion or eagerness in thy way of accosting a whispered ester. Alperl is a fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is generally intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections. She loves me and will love thee. Thou canst not think, said the minister. Glancing aside, it has to bring. How my heart dreads this interview and yearns for it. But in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily one to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee nor prattle in my ear nor answer to my smile. But stand apart and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet, Burl, wise in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me. The first time thou knowest it well. The last was when thou letst her with thee. To the house of yonder stern old governor, and thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf, and mine answered the mother. I remember it, and so shall little Pearl fear nothing. She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee. By this time Burl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet, that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty. In its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Burl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Burl stood, looking so steadfastly at them, through the dim medium of the forest gloom. Herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine that was attracted thitherward as by a certain empathy. In the brook beneath stood another child, another and the same. But likewise its ray of golden light Hester felt herself in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, as strange from Burl, as if the child in her lonely ramble through the forest had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it. There was both truth and error in the impression. The child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Burl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all that Burl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wanted place and hardly knew where she was. I have a strange fancy observed the sensitive minister, that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Burl again. Or is she an elfish spirit who, as the legends of our childhood daughters, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her, for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves. Come, dearest child, said Hester, encouragingly, and stretching out both their arms. How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine who must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward, as thy mother alone could give thee. Leap across the brook, and come to us. Thou canst leap, like a young dear. Burl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her bright, wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Nimsdale felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand, with that gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary, stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Burl stretched out her hand with the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was a flower girdled and sunny image of little Burl, pointing her small forefinger to. Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me, exclaimed Esther? Burl still pointed with her forefinger. And a frown gathered on her brow, the more impressive from the childish, the almost babylike aspect of the features that conveyed it, as her mother still kept beckoning to her, and a wraying face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles. The child damped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook again was the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect of little Burl. Hasten, Burl, or I shall be angry with thee, cried Esther Brynne, who, however, in your desuch behavior on the elf child's part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run hither, else I must come to thee. But, Burl, not a wit startled at her mother's threats any more than modified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a bitter passion, gesticulating violently and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides, so that alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if her hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Burl's image ground and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot wildly gesticulating and in the midst of all still pointing its small forefinger at Esther's bosom. I see what else the child was put Esther into the clergyman, and don't impale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance. Children will not abide any, the slightest change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes, for this is something that she has always seen me wear. I pray you, answer the minister, if thou hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibben's adderty attempting to smile. I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Burl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a better natural effect. Pacifier, if thou lovest me, has deterned again towards Burl with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while even before she had time to speak the blush yielded to a deadly baller. Burl, said she sadly, looked down at thy feet there before thee on the hither side of the brook. The child earned her eyes to the point indicated in their lay the scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream that the golden broidery was reflected in it. Bring it hither, said Esther. Come thou and take it up, answered Burl. Was ever such a child observed Esther aside to the minister? Oh, I have much to tell thee about her, but in very truth she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer, only a few days longer, until we shall have left this region and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it. The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand and swallow it up forever with these words. She advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully but a moment ago, as Esther had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space. She had drawn an hour's free breath, and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on the old spot, so it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom, Esther next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, depotted like fading sunshine, and a great shadow seemed to fall across her. When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand, Pearl. Does thou know thy mother now, child, as she reproachfully, but with a subdued tone? Will thou come across the brook and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her, now that she is sad? Yes, now I will, answered the child, bounding across the brook and glassping Esther in her arms. Now thou art my mother indeed, and I am thy little girl in a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her. She drew down her mother's head and kissed her brow on both her cheeks. But then, by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish, Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter to that was not kind, said Esther. When thou hast shown me a little love, thou mockest me. Why doth the minister sit yonder, asked Pearl? He waits to welcome thee, replied her mother. Come thou and entreat his blessing. He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother too. Wilt thou not love him? Come, he longs to greet thee, that they love us, said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence into her mother's face. Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together into the town? Not now, my child, answered Esther. But in days to come he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own, and thou shalt sit upon his knee, and he will teach thee many things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him, wilt thou not. And will he always keep his hand over his heart in quiet bill? Foolish, child, what a question is that, exclaimed her mother. Come, man, ask his blessing. But whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every petty child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces, of which ever since her babyhood she had possessed a singular variety and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different aspects, with a new mischief in them each and all. The minister, painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to admit him into the child's kindly regards, bent forward and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon Pearl broke away from her mother and, running to the brook, stooped over it and bathed her fired, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart, silently watching as to earn the clergyman. While they talked together and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and the purposes soon to be fulfilled, and now this fateful interview had come to a close, the dell was to be left in solitude among its dark old trees, which with their multitudinous tongues would whisper along of what had passed there and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other dell to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a wit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages here to fall. CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN AMAZE. As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great of a sickitude of his life could not at once be received as real. But there was Hester, clad in her grey robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together and find a single hour's rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook, now that the intrusive third person was gone and taking her old place by her mother's side. So the minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed. In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them that the old world, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam or the few settlements of Europeans scattered thinly along the seaboard. Not to speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement. The higher the state, the more delicately adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour, one of those unquestionable cruisers frequent at that day, with, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne, whose vocation, as a self-enlisted sister of charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew, could take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable. The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present. This is most fortunate, he had said to himself, now, while the Reverend Mr. Dinsale considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless, to hold nothing back from the reader, it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the election sermon, and as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. At last they shall say of me, thought this exemplary man, that I leave no duty unperformed or ill-performed. Sad indeed that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived. We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him. But none, we apprehend, so pitably weak, no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. The excitement of Mr. Dinsale's feelings as he returned from his interview with Hester lent him an unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway along the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man than he remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in a short, all of the difficulties of the track, with an unwariable activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath, he had toiled over the same ground only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There indeed was each former trace of the street as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the house, with the due multitude of gabled peaks, and a weathercock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked neither old nor young now, the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet today. It was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance, and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange and yet so familiar an aspect that Mr. Dinsdale's mind vibrated between two ideas, either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now. This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the laps of years. The minister's own will and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It was the same town as Hirtu-4, but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to the friends who greeted him, I am not the man for whom you take me. I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret del by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy brook. Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there like a cast-off garment. His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him, Thou art thyself, the man. But this error would have been their own, not his. Before Mr. Dinsdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code in that interior kingdom was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do something strange, wild, wicked thing, or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man addressed himself with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege, which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use, and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister's professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with this absence, and respect enjoined upon it, as from the lower social rank and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimsdale and this excellent and horny bearded deacon, it was only by the most careful self-control that the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind, respecting the communion supper. He absolutely trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister's impiety. Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street, the Reverend Dimsdale encountered the eldest female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart full of reminisces about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial ground is full of storied gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul by religious consolations and the truth of Scripture. Wherewith, she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years, and since Mr. Dimsdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's chief earthly comfort, which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all, was to meet her pastor, with her casually or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing gospel truth from his beloved lips into her dulled but raptuously attentive ear. But on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimsdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor ought else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instillment thereof, into her mind, would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion, what he really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good widow's comprehension, or which Providence interpreted, after a method of its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy, that seemed like the shine of a celestial city on her face, so wrinkled in ashy pale. Again, a third instance, after parting from the old church member, he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won, and won by the reverend Mr. Dimsdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil, to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure, as a lily that had bloomed in paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined with the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or, shall we not rather say, this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the archfiend whispered him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit at times. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the fields of innocence, with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So, with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained, he held his jennifer cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She ransacked her conscience, which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work bag, and took herself to task, poor thing, for a thousand imaginary faults, and went about her household duties with swollen eyelids the next morning. Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous and almost as horrible. It was, we blushed to tell it, it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan children, who were playing there, and had just begun to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seamen, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main, and here, since he had so valiantly forebode all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at last to shake hands with this tarry black guard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths. It was not so much a better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still more his buck-rammed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him safely through the latter crisis. What is it that hurts and tempts me, thus? cried the minister to himself at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand against his forehead. Am I mad, or am I giving over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he now summon me to its fulfillment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness, which his most foul imagination can conceive? At the moment, when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand appearance, having on a high headdress a rich gown of velvet, and a rough done-up with a famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her a special friend, had taught her the secret, before the last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder. Whether the witch had read the minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop, looking shrewdly in his face, smiled craftily, and, though little given to converse with clergymen, began a conversation. So, Reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest, observed the witch-lady, nodding her high headdress to him. The next time I pray, you allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you company. Without taking over much upon myself, my good word will go far towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from Younger Podlante you want off. I profess, madam, answered the clergymen, with a grave obscence, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good breeding-maid imperative, I profess on my conscience and character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words. I went not into the forest to seek a pontentate. Neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a view of gaining the favour of such personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle Elliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won from heathendom. Ha-ha-ha! cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high headdress at the minister. Well, well, we must talk thus in the daytime. You carry it off like an old hand, but at midnight in the forest we shall have other talk together. She passed on with her aged statelyness, but often turning back her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognize a secret intimacy of connection. Have I then sold myself, thought the minister, to the fiend whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and master? The Richard minister. He had made a bargain very like it, tempted by a dream of happiness. He had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done before. To what he knew was deadly sin, and the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke to tempt even while they frightened him. And his encounter with old mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits. He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the burial-ground, and hastening up the stairs took refuge in his study. The minister was glad to have reached this shelter without first betraying himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been continually impelled while passing through the streets. He entered the accustomed room and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestreet comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk from the forest dale into the town and thitherward. Here he had studied and written. Here he had gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive. Here striven to pray, here borne a hundred thousand agonies. There was the Bible in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all. There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush upon the page, two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far into the election sermon. But he seemed to stand apart and eye this former self with a scornful pity, but half envious curiosity. That self was gone. Another man had returned out of the forest a wiser one, with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that. While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the study, and the minister said, Come in, not wholly devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did. It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast. Welcome home, Reverend Sir, so the physician, and how found you that godly man, the Apostle Elliot, but me thinks, dear Sir, you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been too sore for you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to preach your election sermon? Nay, I think not so rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, my journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle Yonder, and the free air which I had breathed, have done me good after so long confinement in my study. I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand. At this time, Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or at least his competent suspicion, with respect to his own interview with Hester Prin. The physician knew, then, that in the minister's regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a part of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a time often passes before words embody things, and with what security two persons, who chose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would touch and express words upon the real physician which they sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician in his dark way creep frightfully near the secret. Were it not better, he said, that you use my poor skill tonight? Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous for this occasion of the election discourse. The people look for great things from you, apprehending that another year may come about and find their bastard gone. Yes, to another world replied the minister with pious resignation. Heaven granted that a better one, four, in good sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the fleeting seasons of another year. But touching your medicine, kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it not. I joy to hear it, administered the physician. It may be that my remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect. Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's gratitude, could I achieve this cure? I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend, said Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, with a solemn smile. I thank you, and can but requite your good deeds with my prayers. A good man's prayers are golden recompense, rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took his leave. Yay, they are the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the king's own mint mark on them. Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then, flinging the already written pages of the election sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired, and only wondered that heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles, through so foul an organ pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved forever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy. Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it. Morning came and peeped, blushing, through the curtains, and at last sunrise through a golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled eyes. There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast immeasurable tract of written space behind him. CHAPTER XXI THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY Sometimes in the morning of the day on which the new governor was to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and Little Pearl came into the marketplace. It was already thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in considerable numbers, among whom likewise were many rough figures, whose attire of deer skins marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements which surrounded the little metropolis of the colony. On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline, while again the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask, or rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features, owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle. It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before, nor indeed vivid enough to be detected now, unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have afterward sought a corresponding development in the countenance and mean. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer, the people's victim and lifelong bond slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach, a few hours longer, and the deep mysterious ocean will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn on her bosom. Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last long, breathless draft of the cup of warm wood and aloes with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating in its chaste and golden beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor after the leaves of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency. Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of gloomy gray, or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the child. Her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond that sparkles in flashes with the varied throbbing of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them, always especially a sense of any trouble or impending revolution. Of whatever kind in domestic circumstances, and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow. This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement rather than walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate and sometimes piercing music. When they reached the marketplace, she became still more restless on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot, for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house than the center of a town's business. Why, what is this, mother? cried she. Wherefore have all the people left their work today? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the blacksmith. He has washed his sooty face and put on his sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry if any kind body would only teach him how. And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. What does he do so, mother? He remembers thee a little babe, my child, answered Hester. He should not nod and smile at me for all that, the black, grim, ugly-eyed old man, said Pearl. He may nod at thee if he will, for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see, mother, how many faces of strange people and Indians among them, and sailors. What have they all come to do here in the marketplace? They wait to see the procession pass, said Hester. For the governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers and all the great people and good people with the music and the soldiers marching before them. And will the minister be there? asked Pearl. And will he hold out both his hands to me, as when thou letst me to him from the brookside? He will be there, child, answered her mother. But he will not greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him. What a strange, sad man is he, said the child, as of speaking partly to herself. In the dark night-time he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss. And he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it off. But here, in the sunny day and among all the people, he knows us not, nor must we know him. A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his heart. Be quiet, Pearl. Thou understandest not these things, said her mother. Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is everybody's face today. The children have come from their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy. For, today, a new man is beginning to rule over them, and so, as has been the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered, they make merry and rejoice, as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world. It was, as Hester said, in regard to the unwanted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year, as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries, the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity, thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction. But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the marketplace of Boston had not been born to the inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch, a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation at such festivals puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud old London, we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show, might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the Commonwealth, the statesmen, the priest, and the soldier, seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence. All came forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed. Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which at all other times seemed of the same peace and material with their religion. Here it is true were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James. No rude shows of a theatrical kind, no minstrel with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleaman with an ape dancing to his music, no juggler with his tricks of mimic witchcraft, no Mary Andrew to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which gave law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great honest face of the people smiled, grimly perhaps, but widely, too. Nor were sportswanting, such as the colonists had witnessed and shared in long ago, at the country fairs and on the village greens of England, in which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the marketplace. In one corner there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff, and, what attracted most interest of all, on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defense were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the town beetle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places. It may not be too much to affirm on the whole, the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry in their day, that they would compare favorably in point of holiday keeping with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early immigrants, wore the blackest shade of puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it that all the subsequent years have not suffice to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety. The picture of human life in the marketplace, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown or black of the English immigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians, in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear, stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity beyond what even the puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners, a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish main, who had come ashore to see the humors of election day. They were rough-looking desperados with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard. Their wide short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, even in good nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were binding on all others, smoking tobacco under the beetle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling, and quaffing at their pleasure, drafts of wine or aquavite from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed for the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have periled all their necks in a modern court of justice. But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling and become, at once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land, nor, even in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbeignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men. And it excited neither surprise nor animate version when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the marketplace in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel. The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his side, and a sword cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air without undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the character as to afish his glistening scales. After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled idly through the marketplace, until happening to approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize, and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area, a sort of magic circle, had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped its faded wearer, partly by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly withdrawal of her fellow creatures. Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard. And so changed was Hester Prynne's repute before the public that the matron in town, most imminent for rigid morality, could not have held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself. So, mistress, said the mariner, I must bid the steward make ready for one more birth than you bargained for, no fear of scurvy or ship fever this voyage. What with the ship surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill, more by token as there is a lot of apothecary stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel. What mean you, inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to appear. Have you another passenger? Why, know you not, cried the shipmaster, that this physician here, Chillingworth he calls himself, is minded to try my cabin fare with you? Aye, aye, you must have known it, for he tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of, he that is in peril from these sour old purits and rulers. They know each other well indeed, replied Hester, with a mean of calmness, though in the utmost consternation. They have long dwelt together. Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne, but at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the remotest corner of the marketplace, and smiling on her, a smile which, across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd, conveyed secret and fearful meaning. End of Chapter 21. Chapter 22 Of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Christina Boyles. Send email to scholarcat.com Chapter 22 The Scarlet Letter Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts and consider what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way toward the meeting house, where, in compliance with a custom thus early established and ever since observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an election sermon. Soon the head of the procession showed itself with a slow and stately march, turning a corner and making its way across the marketplace. First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and placed with no great skill, but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude, that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence throughout the morning. She gazed silently, and seemed to be born upward like a floating seabird on the long heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armor of the military company, which followed after the music and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldierry, which still sustains a corporate existence and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honorable fame, was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and so far as peaceful exercise would teach them the practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the company, some of them indeed by their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel and with plumage nodding over their bright morians, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal. And yet, the men of civil eminence who came immediately behind the military escort were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior's huddy stride look vulgar if not absurd. It was an age what we call talent, had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produced stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right, the quality of reverence, which in their descendants, if it survived at all, exists in smaller proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. But the change may be for good or ill and is partly perhaps for both. In that old day, the English settler on these rude shores, having left king nobles in all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age, on long-tried integrity, on solid wisdom and sad colored experience, on endowments of that grave and weighty order which gives the idea of permanence and comes under the general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore, Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their com peers who were elevated to power by the earthly choice of the people, seemed to have been not often brilliant but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of continents and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the house of peers or made the privy council of the sovereign. Next, in order to the magistrates, came the young and eminently distinguished divine from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected. His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life. For leaving a higher motive out of the question, it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshiping respect of the community to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power, as in the case of increased matter, was within the grasp of a successful priest. It was the observation of those who beheld him now that never since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gate and air with which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step as at other times his frame was not bent nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart. Yet if the clergymen were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent cordial which is distilled only in the furnace glow of earnest and long continued thought or perchance. His sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music that swelled heavenward and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body moving onward and with an unaccustomed force, but where was his mind far and deep in its own region, busying itself with preternatural activity to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him. But the spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along unconscious of the burden and converting it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect who have grown morbid possess this occasional power of mighty effort into which they throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many more. Hester Prynne gazing steadfastly at the clergyman felt a dreary influence come over her but wherefore or whence she knew not unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest with its little dell of solitude and love and anguish and the mossy tree trunk where sitting hand in hand they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each other then? And was this the man? She hardly knew him now. He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were in the rich music with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers. He so unattainable in his worldly position and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thought through which she now beheld him. Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion and that vividly as she had dreamed it there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself and thus much of woman was there in Hester that she could scarcely forgive him least of all now when the heavy footsteps of their approaching fate might be heard nearer nearer for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world while she groped darkly and stretched forth her cold hands and found him not. Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings or herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face. Mother, said she, was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook? Hold thy peace, dear little pearl, whispered her mother. We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest. I could not be sure that it was he, so strange he looked, continued the child. Else I would have run to him and bid him kiss me now before all the people, even as he did yonder among the dark old trees. What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his hands over his heart and scowled at me and bid me be gone? What should he say, pearl? answered Hester, save that it was no time to kiss and that kisses are not to be given in the marketplace. Well for thee foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him. Another shade of the same sentiment in reference to Mr. Dimstale was expressed by a person whose eccentricities or insanity as we should term it, led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on, to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who arrayed in great magnificence with a triple rough, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this ancient lady had the renown, which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life, of being a principal actor and all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her and seemed to fear the touch of her garment as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous foals. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne, kindly as so many now felt towards the latter, the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins was doubled and caused a general movement from that part of the marketplace in which the two women stood. Now what mortal imagination could conceive it? Whispered the old lady confidentially to Hester, yonder divine man, that saint on earth as the people uphold him to be, and as I must need say, he really looks. Who now that saw him pass in the procession would think how little wild it is since he went forth out of his study, chewing a Hebrew text of scripture in his mouth I warrant to take an airing in the forest. Aha, we know what that means, Hester Prynne. But truly for Seuth I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church member saw I walking behind the music that has danced in the same measure with me when somebody was fiddler and it might be an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us. That is but a trifle when a woman knows the world. But this minister could thou surely tell Hester whether he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path? Madam, I know not of what you speak, answered Hester Prynne, feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind yet strangely startled and awestruck and by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal connection between so many persons herself among them and the evil one. It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of the word like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. Fie, woman, fie, cried the old lady shaking her finger at Hester. Just thou think I have been to the forest so many times and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there. Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore while they danced be left in their hair. I know thee, Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in the sunshine and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it openly, so there need be no question about that. But this minister, let me tell thee in thine ear, when the black man sees one of his own servants signed and sealed so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he has a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of the world. What is it that the minister seeks to hide with his hand always over his heart? Ah, good Mistress Hibbins, eagerly asked Little Pearl, has thou seen it? No matter, darling, responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a profound reverence. Thou thyself will see it one time or another. They say, child, thou art the lineage of the Prince of the air. Will thou ride with me some fine night to see thy father? Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart, laughing so shrilly that all the marketplace could hear her, the weird old gentlewoman took her departure. By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the meeting house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the spot. As a sacred edifice was too much throng to admit another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister's very peculiar voice. This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, in so much that a listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender in a tongue native to the human heart wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness and sympathized so intimately that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as if the wind sinking down to repose itself, then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was forever in it an essential character of plaintiveness, a low, loud expression of anguish, the whisper or shriek as it might be conceived of suffering humanity that touched a sensibility in every bosom. At times, this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and commanding, when it gushed irrepressibly upward, when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid walls and diffuse itself in the open air, still if the auditor listened intently and for the purpose he could detect the same cry of pain, what was it? The complaint of a human heart, sorrow laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind, beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness at every moment in each accent and never in vain. It was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most appropriate power. During all this time, Hester stood statue-like at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot once she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her to ill-define to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity. Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side and was playing at her own about the marketplace. She made the somber crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which today was doubly indefatigable in its tiptoe dance, because it was played upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to excite her ever-active and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward and, as we might say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as she desired it. But without yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions and requital, Puritans looked on. And if they smiled, were nonetheless inclined to pronounce the child the demon offspring from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure and sparkled with activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land. And they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl as if a flake on the sea foam had taken the shape of a little maid and were gifted with a soul of the sea fire that flashes beneath the prow in the nighttime. One of these seafaring men, the shipmaster indeed, who had spoken to Hester Prynne, was so smitten with Pearl's aspect that he attempted to lay hands upon her with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a hummingbird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy skill that once seen there it became a part of her and would have was difficult to imagine her without it. Thy mother is yonder woman with a scarlet letter, said the seaman. But thou carry her a message from me. If the message pleases me I will, answered Pearl, then teller rejoined her that I spake again with the black of visage tump-shoulder old doctor, and he engages to bring his friend, the gentleman she wants of aboard with him. So let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou teller this, thou witch baby? Mistress Hibbon says my father is the prince of the air, cried Pearl with a naughty smile. If thou callest me that ill name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a tempest. Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned to her mother and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester strong, calm, steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last on beholding this dark and grim continents of an inevitable doom. Which at the moment when a passage seemed to open from the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of misery, showed itself with an unrelenting smile right in the midst of their path, with her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the ship master's intelligence involved her. She was also subjected to another trial. There were many people present from the country, round about who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, who had never beheld it with their own pothly eyes. These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness, unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance, they accordingly stood, fixed there by centrifugal force of the repugnance, which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors likewise, observing the press of spectators and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sun-burnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity and gliding through the crowd fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must need be a personage of high dignity among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town, their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself by sympathy with what they saw others feel, lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and recognized the self-same faces of that group of matrons who had awaited her forthcoming from the prison door seven years ago, all save one, the youngest, and only compassionate among them whose burial robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the center of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more painfully than at any time since the first day she put it on. While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy where the cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her forever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control the sainted minister in the church, the woman of the scarlet letter in the marketplace, what imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X-dot-O-R-G. Recording by Kristi Nowak. The eloquent voice on which the souls of the listening audience had been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea at length came to a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half hushed tumult as if the auditors released from the high spell that had transported them into the region of another's mind were returning into themselves with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In a moment more the crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the church. Now that there was an end they needed more breath, more fit to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed than that atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought. In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the marketplace absolutely babbled from side to side with the plazas of the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear. According to their united testimony never had men spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit as he that spake this day, nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his. Its influence could be seen as it were, descending upon him and possessing him and continually lifting him up out of the written discourse that lay before him and filling him with ideas that must have been as marvelous to himself as to his audience. His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the deity and the communities of mankind with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. And as he drew towards the close a spirit of prophecy had come upon him constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference. That, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord, but throughout it all and through the whole discourse there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos which could not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to pass away. Yes, their minister whom they so loved and who so loved them all that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh had the foreboding of untimely death upon him and would soon leave them in their tears. This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced. It was as if an angel in his passage to the skies had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant, at once a shadow and a splendor, and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them. Thus there had come to the reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, as to most men in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it far behind them an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one or than any which could hereafter be. He stood at this moment on the very proudest eminence of superiority to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of widest sanctity could exalt a clergyman in New England's earliest days when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the close of his election sermon. Meanwhile, Hester Prine was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast. Now was heard again the clamor of the music and the measured tramp of the military escort issuing from the church door. The procession was to be marshaled thence to the town hall where a solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day. Once more therefore the train of venerable and majestic fathers were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people who drew back reverently on either side as the governor and magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy ministers and all that were eminent and renowned advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in the marketplace their presence was greeted by a shout. This, though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the childlike loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers, was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt the impulse in himself and in the same breath caught it from his neighbor. Within the church it had hardly been kept down. Beneath the sky it peeled upward to the zenith. There were human beings enough and enough of highly wrought and symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than the organ tones of the blast or the thunder or the roar of the sea, even that mighty swell of many voices blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never from the soil of New England had gone up such a shout. Never a New England soil had stood the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher. How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head, so etherealised by spirit as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps in the procession really tread upon the dust of the earth? As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach among them. The shout died into a murmur as one portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he looked amid all his triumph. The energy, or say rather the inspiration which had held him up until he should have delivered the sacred message that had brought its own strength along with it from heaven, was withdrawn now that it had so faithfully performed its office. The glow which they had just before beheld burning on his cheek was extinguished like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man alive with such a deathlike hue. It was hardly a man with life in him that tottered on his path so nervously, yet tottered and did not fall. One of his clerical brethren, it was the venerable John Wilson, observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave of intellect and sensibility stepped forward hastily to offer his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly repelled the old man's arm. He still walked onward if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant with its mother's arms in view outstretched to tempt him forward. And now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he came opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester Prine had encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding little pearl by the hand, and there was the scarlet letter on her breast. The minister here made a pause, although the music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the procession moved. It summoned him onward, inward to the festival, but here he made a pause. Belling him for the last few moments had kept an anxious eye upon him. He now left his own place in the procession and advanced to give assistance, judging from Mr. Dimstale's aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter's expression that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague intimations that pass from one spirit to another. The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly faintness was, in their view, only another phase of the minister's celestial strength. Nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so wholly had he ascended before their eyes waxing dimmer and brighter and fading at last into the light of heaven. He turned towards the scaffold and stretched forth his arms. Hester, said he, come hither, come, my little pearl. It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them, but there was something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child, with the birdlike motion which was one of her characteristics, flew to him and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester prined, slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will, likewise drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this instant, old Roger Killingworth thrust himself through the crowd, or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed and evil was his look he rose up out of some nether region to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do. Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward and caught the minister by the arm. Madam, hold! What is your purpose? whispered he. Wave back that woman, cast off this child. All shall be well. Do not blacken your fame and perish in dishonor. I can yet save you. Would you bring in for me on your sacred profession? Ha! Temptor, me thinks thou art too late, answered the minister, encountering his eye, fearfully but firmly. Thy power is not what it was. With God's help I shall escape thee now. He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter. Hester prined, cried he with a piercing earnestness, in the name of him so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace at this last moment to do what, for my own heavy sin and miserable agony, I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now and twine thy strength about me. Thy strength, Hester, but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me. This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his might, with all his own might, and the fiends. Come, Hester, come, support me up yonder scaffold. The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity who stood there immediately around the clergymen were so taken by surprise and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw, unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other, that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the judgment which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approached the scaffold, and ascended steps, while still the little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well-entitled, therefore to be present at its closing scene. Hatzthau sought the whole earth over, said he, looking darkly at the clergymen, there was no one place so secret, no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me, save on this very scaffold. Thanks be to him who hath led me hither, answered the minister. Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester with an expression of doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed that there was a feeble smile upon his lips. Is not this better, murmured he, than what we dreamed of in the forest? I know not, I know not, she hurdly replied. Better? Yea, so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us. For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order, said the minister, and God is merciful. Let me now do the will which he hath made plain before my sight, for, Hester, I am a dying man, so let me make haste to take my shame upon me. Partly supported by Hester Prine and holding one hand of little Pearls, the reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable rulers, to the holy ministers who were his brethren, to the people whose great heart was thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep life matter which, if full of sin was full of anguish and repentance likewise, was now to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the clergymen, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar of eternal justice. People of New England, he cried with a voice that rose over them high, solemn, and majestic, yet had always a tremor through it, and sometimes a shriek struggling up out of the fathomless depths of remorse and woe. Ye that loved me, ye that have deemed me holy, behold me here, the one sinner of the world, at last, at last I stand upon the spot where, seven years since I should have stood, here, with this woman, whose arm of more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hither word, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from groveling down upon my face. Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears, ye have all shuttered at it, wherever her walk hath been, wherever so miserably burdened she may have hoped to find repose, it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her, but there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuttered. It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder of his secret undisclosed, but he fought back the bodily weakness and, still more the faintness of heart, that was striving for the mastery of him, he threw off all assistance and stepped passionately forward a pace before the woman and the child. It was on him, he continued, with a kind of fierceness, so determined was he to speak out the whole. God's eye beheld it, the angels were forever pointing at it, the devil knew it well and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning finger, but he hid it cunningly from men and walked among you with the mean of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in his sinful world and sad because he missed his heavenly kindred. Now at the death-hour he stands up before you, he bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter. He tells you that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart. Stand any here that question God's judgment on a sinner? Behold, a dreadful witness of it. With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed, but it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle, while the minister stood with a flush of triumph in his face as one who, in the crisis of acutist pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold. Hester partly raised him and supported his head against her bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed. Thou hast escaped me, he repeated more than once. Thou hast escaped me! May God forgive thee, said the minister. Thou too hast deeply sinned. He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man and fixed them on the woman and the child. My little pearl, said he, feebly, and there was a sweet and gentle smile over his face as of a spirit sinking into deeper pose. Nay, now that the burden was removed it seemed almost as if he would be supportive with the child. Dear little pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not yonder in the forest, but now thou wilt? Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief in which the wild infant bore apart had developed all her sympathies, and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was fulfilled. Hester, said the clergyman, farewell. Shall we not meet again? whispered she, bending her face down close to his. Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely we have ransomed one another with all this woe. Thou lookest far into eternity with those bright dying eyes. Then tell me what thou seest. Hush, Hester, hush, said he, with tremulous solemnity. The law we broke, the sin here awfully revealed. Let these alone be in thy thoughts. I fear. I fear. It may be that when we forgot our God, when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul, it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows, and he is merciful. He hath proved his mercy most of all in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast, by sending yonder dark and terrible old man to keep the torture always at red heat, by bringing me hither to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people, had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever. Praised be his name, his will be done. Farewell. That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 After many days when time sufficed for the people to arrange their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold. Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a scarlet letter. The very semblance of that worn by Hester Bryn imprinted in the flesh as regarded its origin. There were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirm that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Bryn versed war her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance, which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent. When old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs, others, again and those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility and the wonderful operation of his spirit on the body, whispered their belief that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the innermost art outwardly and at last manifesting heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain. Where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness, it is singular nevertheless that certain persons who expectators of all seen and profess never once to have removed their eyes from the reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast more than on a newborn infant's, neither by their report, had his dying words acknowledged or even remotely implied any, this lightest connection on his part with the guilt for which has to print had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying, conscious also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels, had desired by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman to express to the world how utterly new Katori is the choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson that, in the view of infinite purity, we all sin as all alike. It was to teach them that the holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the mercy which looks down and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man's friends, and especially a clergyman's, will sometimes uphold his character when proofs clear as the midday sunshine on the scarlet letter establish them a false and sin-stained creature of the dust. The authority which we have cheaply followed, a manuscript of old date drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals some of whom had known as de Bruyne while others had heard the tale from contemporary witnesses fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience we put only this into a sentence. Be true, be true, be true, show freely to the world if not your worst yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred. Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death in the appearance and demeanor of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy, all his vital and intellectual force seemed at once to desert him in so much that he positively withered up shriveled away and almost vanished from mortal sight like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge and when, by its completest triumph for consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it, when, in short, there was no more devil's work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to but take himself whether his master would find him tasks enough and pay him his wages duly, but to all these shadowy beings so long our near acquaintances, as well Roger Chillingworth, as his companions we would feign be merciful, it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom, each in its utmost development. Supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart knowledge, each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life, upon another, each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject, philosophically considered, therefore the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow, in the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister, mutual victims as they have been, may unawares have found their earthly stalk of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love, leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate to the reader, at all Roger Chillingworth's decease, which took place within the year, and by his last will and testament of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both here and in England, to little Burl, the daughter of Esther Brinn, so Burl, the elf child of the demon offspring, as some people up to that epoch persisted in considering her, became the richest heirs of her day in the New World, not in probably this circumstance, brought a very material change in the public estimation, and had the mother and child remained here, little Burl had a marriageable period of life, might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them all, but no time after the physician's death the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared and Burl along with her, for many years, though a vague report would now and then find its way across the sea, like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it, yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received, the story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend, its spell however was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea shore where Esther Brinn had dwelt, near this latter spot one afternoon some children were at play, when they be held at all women in a gray robe approached the cottage door, in all those years it had never once been opened, but either she unlocked it or the decaying wooden iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments, and at all events went in, on the threshold she paused, turning partly round, for perchance the idea of entering alone and also changed, the home of so intense a former life was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear, but her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast, and Esther Brinn had returned and taken up her long forsaken shame, but where her little pearl is still alive she must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood, none new, nor ever learned, with the fullness of perfect certainty, whether the elf child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave, or whether a wild rich nature had been softened and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness, but through the remainder of Esther's life there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land, letters game with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there are articles of comfort and luxuries such as Esther never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased an affection ever imagined for her. There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at the impulse of a fond art. And once, Esther was seen embroidering a baby garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult at any infant thus a peril had been shown to our sober-ewed community. In fine, the gossips of that day believed, and Esther's purveyor pew, who made investigations a century later, believed, and one of his recent successes in office, moreover faithfully believed, that Pearl was not only alive but married and happy and mindful of her mother, and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside, but there was a more real life for Hester Brenier in New England than in that unknown region where Pearl had found home. Here had been her sin, here her sorrow and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed, of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it, resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom, but in the laps of the toilsome, thoughtful and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life the scarlet letter seized to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence, too. And as Hester Brenier had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women more especially, in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why there was so wretched, and what the remedy. Hester comforted and counseled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of a firm belief that at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that an emission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a lifelong sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise. Moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy, and showing how sacred love should make us happy by the truest test of a life successful to such an end. So said Hester Brynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and after many, many years a new grave was delved near an old and sunken one in that burial ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle, yet one tombstone served for both. All around there were monuments carved with ormorial bearings, and on this simple slab of slate, as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the porpet. There appeared the semblance of an engraved its coochin. It bore a device, a heralds wording, of which may serve, for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend. So sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever glowing point of light, glumia, then the shadow, on a field, sable, the letter A, gules, end of chapter 24, recording by Gemma Blythe, end of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Orthorn.