The Scarlet Letter

FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for
so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the
untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a
colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely
as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from
this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever
priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared
not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but
taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one
of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had
watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,—for those it
was easy to arrange,—but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that
day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its
principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his
order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting
of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the
line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven
years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation
for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more
to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None;
unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and
exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the
very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed
criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard
to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,
finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,
sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom
which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken,
that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is
never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded;
so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and
might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in
preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still
the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that
would win over again his unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it
suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

“If, in all these past seven years,” thought he, “I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that
earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now,—since I am irrevocably
doomed,—wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the
condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a
better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,—so tender to soothe! O
Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me!”

“Thou wilt go!” said Hester, calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of
his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it
were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than
throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth.
Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the
devotional in his mood.

“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself. “Methought the
germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem
to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down
upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with
new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the
better life! Why did we not find it sooner?”

“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo
it all, and make it as it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter,
and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the
withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the
stream. With a hand’s breadth farther flight it would have fallen into
the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry
onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring
about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost
jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.

[Illustration: A Gleam of Sunshine]

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden
of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She
had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By another
impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down
it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a
light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her
beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and
clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before
unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of
the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal
hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden
smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into
the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn
trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the
brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a
mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the
outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been
bright in Hester’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s!

Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen
her,—yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She
is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her
dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her.”

“Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?” asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust,—a backwardness to be familiar
with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!”

“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl!
Pearl!”

“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in
a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook.
So thou thinkest the child will love me?”

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of
boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or
distinct,—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit,—as the
splendor went and came again. She heard her mother’s voice, and
approached slowly through the forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, while her mother sat
talking with the clergyman. The great black forest—stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into
its bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it
knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to
welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the
preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as
drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was
pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness
hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented
of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A
pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and
uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the
lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or
merriment,—for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little
personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,—so he
chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a
last year’s nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox,
startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked
inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal
off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,—but here
the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,—came up, and smelt of
Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.
The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild
things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the
human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The flowers appeared to know
it; and one and another whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with
me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—and, to please
them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and
some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before
her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and
became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in
closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly
back.

Slowly; for she saw the clergyman.

[Illustration]

XIX.