THE SCARLET LETTER.

Te Aroha News, Volume XI, Issue 1709, 26 January 1895, Page 4

THE SCARLET LETTER.

By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,

(Continued.) One of his ciencai brethren —it wa? ibe venerable John Wilson —observing the state in which Mr. ininmesctato left by the retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his support. The minister tremulously hut 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. wore the latter steps of his progress, he had come opposite the well remembered and weather darkened scaffold, where long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester JPrynne had encountered the world’s ignominous 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—onward to the festival—but here he made a name. Uellingham 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. Dimmesdale’s aspect, that he must otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter’s expression that warned hack 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 minis- - ter’s celestial strength, nor would- it have seemed a miracle too high to he wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven. He turned toward 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 aad clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne-—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 Chillingworth 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. “Madman, 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! lean yet save you! Would you bring infamy on your sacred proiessionr

“Ha, tempter! Methinks 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 Prynne!” 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—l 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 met This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his might-’-with all his own might and the fiend’s. Come, Hester, come! Support me up yonder scaffold!’*

The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity who stood more immediately around the clergyman 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 ardund him, approach the scaffold and ascend its steps, while still the little hand of the sin bom 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. - < “Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,” said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, “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 hurriedly replied. “Better? Yea; so w® nay both die, and little Pearl die with is?”

“For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall jrder,” said the minister; “and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which he hath made plain before my eight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!” Partly supported by Hester Pryne, and holding one hand of little Pearl's, the Reverend Air. 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 lull of *d», was full of anguish and repentance

uicewise—was now to be laid open to j them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the clergyman 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!” cried he, 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 a fathomless depth of remorse and woe—“ye that have loved me! —ye that have deemed me holy—behold me here the one sinner of the world! At last—at last—l stand upon the spot where seven years since 1 should have stood; here with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment from groveling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath, been —wherever, so miserably burdened, sue may have hoped to find repose—it hath casta lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance around about her. But there stood one in the midst of you.at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not Shuddered!”

It seemed at this point as if the minister must leave the remainder of his secret undisclosed. But he fought hack the bodily weakness—and, still more, the faintness of heart—that was striving for the mastery with 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 itl 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 mien of a spirit, mournful because sq pure in a 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! 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 acutest 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 her, 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.” Ho 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 deep repose; hay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost, as if he would be snortive 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 a part, 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. Toward her mother, too, Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was all 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 each other, 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 so awfully revealed —let these alone be in thy thoughts! 1 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 givr ing 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. CHAPTER XTX. CONCLUSION. 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 Prynne—imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when He_ster Prynne first wore her

ignominious badge, liad begun a course | of penace, which" he afterward in so J many futile methods followed out, by j 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 upon the body—whispered their belief that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart 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 deen mint out of our own Dram, where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene and professed 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 nor even remotely implied any, the slightest, connection on his part with the guilt for which Hester Prynne 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 tip his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. a 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 wo are sinners all alike. It was to teach them that the holiest among ns has but attained so far above hie 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 j be allowed to consider this version of; Mr. Dimmesdale’e story as only an in- i

stance of that Btubbom 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 him a false and sin stained creature of the dust

The authority which we have chiefly followed—a manuscript of old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had known Hester Prynne, 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~mto a sentence: “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if hot your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

At old 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 Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne.

So Pearl—the elf child, the demon offspring, as some people up to that epoch persisted in considering her—became the richest heiress of her day in the New World. Not improbably this circumstance wrought a very material change in the public estimation, * and had the mother and child remained here little. Pearl, at a marriageable period of fife, might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them all. But in no long time after the physician’s death the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many years, though a.vaguer©, port 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 were the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the seashore, where Hester Prynne had dwelt. Near this latter spot one afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage door. In all those years it had never onee been opened; but either she unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her-Jiand, or she glided shadowlike through these impediments and. at all events, went in. On the; threshold she paused-—turned partly around —for perchance the idea of entering all alone and all so : changed the home of so intense a former fife was more dreary and td®olate ; than even she eould hear. But her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast. And Hester Prynne had returned and taken up her long forsaken shame! But where was little Pearl? If still alive, she must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew —nor ever learned, with the fullness of perfect certainty—whether the elf child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave, or whether her wild, rich nature had been Boftened and subdued and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness. But through the remainder of Hester’s life there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with Borne inhabitant of another land. Letters came with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles too—little ornaments, beautiful tokens \

or a continual remembrance tnai muse have been wrought by delicate fingers, at the impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was seen embroidering a baby garment, with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant thus appareled been shown to our sober hued community.

, In fine, the gossips of that day bei Jieved —and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who j I made investigations a century later, bell lieved, and one of his successors in office, ! moreover, faithfully believes—that Pearl ! was not only alive, but married and • happy and mindful of her mother, and , that she would most joyfully have eu- ■ tertained that sad and lonely mother at ! her fireside. i But there was a more real life for i Hester Prynne here, in New England, i than in that unknown region where r : Pearl had found a home. Here hadijjU ; Deen ner sin;, nere ner sorrow, ana uereffP 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 afterward did it quit her bosom But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful and self devoted years -that made up Hester’s life, the sdfrlet let lev ceased to he a stigma which attmvo-d * the world’s scorn and bitterness, am! .became a type of something to be sorro ww i " ; over and looked upon with awe. yet | with reverence too. And as Hester . j Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in j any measure for her own profit and ! joyment, people brought all. their sorj rows and perplexities, and besought htu : counsel, as one who had gone through. » | mighty trouble. Women, more especially, in the conj tinually recurring trials of wounded, ; wasted, wronged, misplaced or -erring I and sinful passion, or with the dreary ; burden of a .heart unyielded, because, j unvalued and unsought, came to Hos- : ter’s cottage, demanding why-they wore j so wretched, and what the remedy. Bus ; ter comforted and counseled them as ; best she might. She assured them, too, i of her firm belief that at soma brighter . I period, when the- world should" have j grown ripe for it, in heaven's own time | a new truth would be revealed in order : to establish the whole relation between i man and woman on a surer ground of •! mutual happiness. | Earlier in life Hester had vainly im- ! agined .'that'she herself might be the j destined prophetess, but had long smee .| recognized the impossibility that -any i mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed, down withshams, or , even burdened with a lifelong .sorrow. : The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, ii-do-h. but lofty, pure and b&cYlltitul. WR-wj. . moreover, not through dusky grief, cut the ethereal medium of jov, arid showing how sacred love should make us happy by the truest test of a life successful to such an end. So said Hester Prynne',' and glanced her sad eyeqgjjftowttw&SLl -M the scarlet letter. And after manyrSSgjy years a new grave was delved near an did. 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 rigli.A ? to mingle. Yet one tombstone served ? for both. All around there were moenments carved with armorial -bearings, and on this simple slab of slate, as the curious investigator may still discern and perplex himself with the purport, there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a i herald’s wording of which might serve I for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend, so somber is it and relieved only by one everglowing point of light gloomier-than the shadow: “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.” THE ENDk j