The Scarlet Letter

HE MINISTER’S VIGIL.

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually
under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale
reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived
through her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or
scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of
seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits
who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of
the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud
muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same
multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne
sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they
would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the
outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But the
town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister
might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden
in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air
would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism,
and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see
him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet,
wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but
the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul
trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while
fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by
the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own
sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which
invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the
other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor,
miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with
crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to
endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage
strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and
most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one
thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot,
the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as
if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast,
right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and
there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain.
Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he
shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and
was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the
hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much
misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were
bandying it to and fro.

“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.
“The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!”

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater
power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town
did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry
either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of
witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over
the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through
the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,
uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows
of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood at some distance, on the
line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a
long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked
unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At
another window of the same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress
Hibbins, the Governor’s sister, also with a lamp, which, even thus far
off, revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She
thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.
Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night-hags, with
whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up
among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The
magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness,—into which,
nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a
mill-stone,—retired from the window.

The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off,
was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here
a post, and there a garden-fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and
there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here, again, an
arched door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the
doorstep. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute
particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his
existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard;
and that the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him, in a few
moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light drew
nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother
clergyman,—or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as
well as highly valued friend,—the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr.
Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some
dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the
death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to
heaven within that very hour. And now, surrounded, like the saint-like
personages of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him
amid this gloomy night of sin,—as if the departed Governor had left
him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself
the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to
see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates,—now, in short, good
Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted
lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to
Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled,—nay, almost laughed at them,—and then
wondered if he were going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the
lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly
restrain himself from speaking.

“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I
pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”

Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant, he
believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered
only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to
step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his
feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform.
When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the
minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the
last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although his
mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of
lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole
in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing
stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted
whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.
Morning would break, and find him there. The neighborhood would begin
to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim
twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place
of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go,
knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the
ghost—as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A
dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then—the
morning light still waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in
great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without
pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous
personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of
their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a
nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly
forth, with his King James’s ruff fastened askew; and Mistress
Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and
looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after
her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the
night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out
of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come
the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale’s church, and the young
virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him
in their white bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and
confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with
their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over
their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken
visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the
red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing
where Hester Prynne had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of
laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish
laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart,—but he knew not whether
of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute,—he recognized the tones of
little Pearl.

“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he after a moment’s pause; then,
suppressing his voice,—“Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?”

“Yes; it is Hester Prynne!” she replied, in a tone of surprise; and
the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk, along
which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.”

“Whence come you, Hester?” asked the minister. “What sent you hither?”

“I have been watching at a death-bed,” answered Hester Prynne;—“at
Governor Winthrop’s death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe,
and am now going homeward to my dwelling.”

“Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,” said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale. “Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.
Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!”

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding
little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child’s other
hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a
tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a
torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the
mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his
half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.

“Minister!” whispered little Pearl.

“What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

“Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?”
inquired Pearl.

“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the
new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had
so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he
was already trembling at the conjunction in which—with a strange joy,
nevertheless—he now found himself. “Not so, my child. I shall,
indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not
to-morrow.”

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister
held it fast.

“A moment longer, my child!” said he.

“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and mother’s
hand, to-morrow noontide?”

“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister, “but another time.”

“And what other time?” persisted the child.

“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister,—and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth
impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But
the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

Pearl laughed again.

[Illustration: “They stood in the noon of that strange splendor”]

But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud
betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome
of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with
the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is
always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The
wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the
doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about
them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the
wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with
green on either side;—all were visible, but with a singularity of
aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things
of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the
embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself
a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the
noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that
is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who
belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its
expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.
Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his
hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many
revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword
of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky,
prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded
by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for
good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to
Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously
warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen
by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith
of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored,
magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it
more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea,
that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful
hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be
deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The
belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that
their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the
same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the
symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered
morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had
extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the
firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his
soul’s history and fate!

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and
heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there
the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in
lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at
that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such
shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little
definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in
it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Dimmesdale’s
psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward
to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl
was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at
no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him,
with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his
features, as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new
expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful
then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he
looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,
and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester
Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger
Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there
with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression,
or so intense the minister’s perception of it, that it seemed still to
remain painted on the darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an
effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.

“Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror. “I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!”

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

“I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again.
“Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless
horror of the man!”

“Minister,” said little Pearl, “I can tell thee who he is!”

“Quickly, then, child!” said the minister, bending his ear close to
her lips. “Quickly!—and as low as thou canst whisper.”

Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved
any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in
a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the
bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud.

“Dost thou mock me now?” said the minister.

“Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!”—answered the child. “Thou
wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow
noontide!”

“Worthy Sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot
of the platform. “Pious Master Dimmesdale, can this be you? Well,
well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need
to be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk
in our sleep. Come, good Sir, and my dear friend, I pray you, let me
lead you home!”

“How knewest thou that I was here?” asked the minister, fearfully.

“Verily, and in good faith,” answered Roger Chillingworth, “I knew
nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the
bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill
might to give him ease. He going home to a better world, I, likewise,
was on my way homeward, when this strange light shone out. Come with
me, I beseech you, Reverend Sir; else you will be poorly able to do
Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now, how they trouble the
brain,—these books!—these books! You should study less, good Sir,
and take a little pastime; or these night-whimseys will grow upon
you.”

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

With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an
ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse
which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most
replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his
lips. Souls, it is said more souls than one, were brought to the truth
by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish
a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter.
But, as he came down the pulpit steps, the gray-bearded sexton met
him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his
own.

“It was found,” said the sexton, “this morning, on the scaffold where
evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take
it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed,
he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs
no glove to cover it!”

“Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister, gravely, but startled
at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost
brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.
“Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”

“And since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle
him without gloves, henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly
smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen
last night?—a great red letter in the sky,—the letter A, which we
interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was
made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there
should be some notice thereof!”

“No,” answered the minister, “I had not heard of it.”

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XIII.