THE SCARLET LETTER.

Te Aroha News, Volume XI, Issue 1707, 19 January 1895, Page 4

THE SCARLET LETTER.

By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNS (Cuutiuuod.) In order to free his mind from this in distinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disauietude. he. recalled and more tliorougniy aehned tne plans wmch Hester and himself tad 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 harbor; one of those questionable cruisers frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roam ed 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. “That is most fortunate 1” he had then said to him* self. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless, td 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 least they shall say of ; me," thought this exemplary man, “that 1 leave no public duty unperformed nor ill performed 1” 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 pitiably weak; no evidence, at onoo 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 mav be the true. The excitement of Mr. Dimmesaaie’s feelings as he returned from his interview with Hester lent him unaccustomed physical energy and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among 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 short, all the difficulties of the track with an unweariable 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 houses, with the due multitude of gable 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 older nor younger 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 them of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkaHv. as he passed under the walls of his osvn enuren. me ecmice had so very strange and yet so familiar an aspect that Mr. Dimmesdale’s mind vibrated between two ideas —either that lie had seen it onl3j.nl 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 lapse of years. The minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and tlio fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore, 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 dell by a mossy tree trunk and near a melancholy brook 1 Go seek your minister and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain,wrinkled brow be not flung ■'down,Jthere like a cast off garment!” His' friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him, “Thou art thyself the man!” but the error would’ "have been their own. not his. Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home his inner man gave him other evidences c-f a revolution in the sphere of thought

ana feeling, in train, nom u , s

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 some 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. * *

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 boohs, its windows, its fireplace and the tapestried comfort of the walls with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here, 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 out upon the page two days before. Ho knew that it was himself, the thin andl ■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 scornful, pitying, 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 ftffljgjfcg, 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 ho wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion that he fancied himself inspired, and only wondered zthat 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 flight fled away as if it were a winged steed and he careering on u; morning came and peeped, blushing, through the curtains, and at last sunrise threw 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, of written space behind him. " CHAPTER XVI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY. Betimes 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 market place. 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 deerskins 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 baok from this twilight indistinctness and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination. Heij 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 tq 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; * * * ■'!

Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. 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 gofgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child’s appareL was the same that had achieved a tafli perhaps more difficult in imparting to distinct a peculiarity to Hester’s simpfe robe. The dress, so proper was it # little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or u|. evitable development and outward maijifestation of her character, no more to be separated from her than the mam 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 singulij inquietude and excitement; in ner mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles aid flashes with the varied throbbings of tie breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy 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 geim on her mother’s unquiet bosom, betrayed by the very dance of her spirits the emotions which none could detect in he marble passiveness of Hester’s brow. -- This effervescence made her flit with a birdiike movement, rather than walk by her mother’s side. She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inartiL. late and sometimes piercing m#ic When they reached the market place 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 Vil-

isgo meeting' oouse than. tno Contar ox a. town’s business. . ; ■ . , “Why, what i 3 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 farft nud nut on his Sabbath day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly he merry if any kind body would .only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why 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 market place? ’ “They wait to see the procession pass,” said Hester. ‘.‘For the goyemor 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 ledst me to him from the brookside?” “He will be there, child,”. answered her mother. “But he will not greet thee today; nor must thou greet him.” “What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. “1“ the dark night time he rails 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 imosst And he kisses my forehead; too,; so that the little brook would hardly ' wash it off! But here, in the sunny day, L and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always oyer his, heart!”

“Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandesi 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 purpos'e to be happy. For today a new man is beginning to rule oyer them, and so—as has been the cus- i tom of mankind-ever since a nation was j first gathered—they make merry and re-1 ' joice, as if a good and golden year were | ati length to pass over, the poor old'' ■world!” *: * * , The picture of human life in the mar- 1 ket nlace. though its ereneral tint was j tnesaa gray, Drown or Diacn or me ring- I lish emigrants, was -yet enlivened by , Some diversity of hue. A party of In- j dians—in their savage finery of curious- j jy embroidered deerskin robes, wampum belts, red and yellow ocher and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stoneheaded spear stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity beyond what even the Puritan-eoirid—attaia.-—-Noiy.-wild -as i 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 desperadoes, 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 beadle’s very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shil-,, ling; and quaffing at their pleasure , drafts of wine or aqua vitae 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 the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. * * * Thus the Puritan elders in their black eloaks, starched bands and steeple crowned bats smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingwortli, the physician, was seen to enter the market place 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 goid 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 fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all wits looked upon as pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales. After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled Idly tnrougn tne marnec piauo, unm happening, to approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize and did -ot hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant 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 fated wearer; partly by her own reserve and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,, withdrawal of her fellow crea-

~ tures! Now, if never' before, it answered ■ a good purpose by enabling Hester and ] the seaman to speak together without j risk of being overheard, and so changed was Hester Prynne’s repute before the public that .the matron in town most eminent for rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less re- ' suit of scandal than herself.. “So, mistress,” said the mariner, “I must bid the steward make ready one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship fever this voyage! What with the ship’s surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger. will bo from drug or pill; more by to)ie|fy.s there is a lot of apothecary’s stuff aboard, wliich I traded for with a Spanish vessel.” “What mean you?’inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to ; n> pear. “Have you another passenger?” “Why, know yon not,” cried the shipmaster, “that this physician here—Ch.il!ingworth 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 y.our party, anda close friend to the gentleman you -spoke of—he.that is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers!” “They know each other well indeed,” replied Hester with a mien of calmness though in the utmost consternation.' “They have long dwelt together.” Nothing further passed -between then*mariner and Hester-Prynne. But amf' that instant she beheld old Roger Chill-' ingworth himself standing , in the remotest comer of the.market place 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. CHAPTER XVII. THE PROCESSION. \ Before Hester Prynne could call to- 5 gether 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 der noted 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 market place. First came the music, It comprised a variety of instruments. Derhans inmerfectlv adapted to. one another, and. played wirn 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 eve. (To be continued.)