XVIII

A Flood of Sunshine

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope and joy shone out, but with fear and horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not speak. Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast and shadowy as this untamed forest. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established. The tendency of her fate had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where others dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, 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. Since then, he had watched with morbid zeal, not only his acts, 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. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience alive and painfully sensitive, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

As regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw had been a preparation for this 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 his mind was darkened by the remorse; 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, infamy, and machinations of an enemy; that, finally, on his dreary and desert path, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life in exchange for the heavy doom. And be the stern truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel. But there is still the ruined wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe. 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 Heaven’s mercy. But since I am irrevocably doomed, wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before execution? Or, if this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to sustain, 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 made, a glow of enjoyment threw its brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect of the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region. His spirit rose 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. “Methought the germ of it was dead in me! Hester, thou art my better angel! 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, as if it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the verge of the stream. With a hand’s-breadth further flight, it would have fallen into the water. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and be haunted by phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable misfortune.

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 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, imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth 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 richness of her beauty, came back, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown. 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, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each leaf, transmuting the fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the trees.

Such was the sympathy of 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!

Hester looked at Arthur Dimmesdale with a thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen her, I know, 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? I have shrunk from children, they often show a backwardness to be familiar with me. I have even been afraid of Pearl!”

“That was sad! But she will love thee dearly, and thou her. I will call her. Pearl!”

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 to those who brought the guilt and troubles into it – became the playmate of the lonely infant. It offered her the partridge-berries. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge 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 squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment and flung down a nut upon her head. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light footstep, 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, came up, smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, that the mother-forest, and these wild things, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it, and whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with me, beautiful child!” To please them, Pearl gathered the violets, anemones, columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green. With these she decorated her hair and waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant dryad in closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard mother’s voice, and came slowly back.

Slowly – for she saw the clergyman!

XIX

The Child at the Brookside

“Thou wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful? See with what natural skill she has made those flowers adorn her! She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!”

“Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile, “that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought – oh, what a thought is that, how terrible to dread it! – that my features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see it! 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.”

It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world these seven past years, in her was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their lives and future destinies were conjoined when they beheld at once the material union, and the spirit, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together; thoughts like these threw an awe about the child as she came onward.

“Let her see nothing strange, no passion or eagerness, in thy way of accosting her,” whispered Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is 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, “how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar with me. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time – thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor.”

“Thou didst plead so bravely in our behalf! I remember it; and so shall little Pearl!”

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together, 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 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 Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child. It was strange, the way in which she stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, 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 were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s. Another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, returning, could not find her wonted 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 thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends taught us, 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. “How slow thou art! 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.”

Pearl, 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 explain to herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child’s eyes upon himself, his hand stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, pointing evidently towards her mother’s breast. Beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled, sunny image of Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.

“Thou strange child! Why dost thou not come to me?” exclaimed Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on her brow – the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it.

“Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!” cried Hester, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the child’s part before, was anxious for a more seemly deportment now.

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother’s threats any more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions.

“I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester to the clergyman, turning pale in spite of an effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance, “Children will not abide any change in the accustomed aspect of things. Pearl misses something she has always seen me wear!”

“I pray you! If thou hast means of pacifying her, do it forthwith if thou lovest me!”

Hester turned towards Pearl with a crimson blush and then a heavy sigh, before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor.

“Pearl,” said she sadly, “look down at thy feet! There! On the side of the brook!”

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay the scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that the gold embroidery was reflected in it.

“Bring it hither!” said Hester.

“Come thou and take it up!” answered Pearl.

“Was ever such a child!” observed Hester aside to the minister. “Oh, I have much to tell thee about her! But she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer until we shall have left this region. The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!”

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her as she received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had drawn an hour’s free breath and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on the old spot! So it ever is that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom. Hester 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, her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a grey shadow seemed to fall across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl.

“Dost thou know thy mother now, child?” asked she. “Wilt 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 clasping Hester in her arms “Now thou art my mother indeed! and I am thy little Pearl!”

In a mood of tenderness, she drew down her mother’s head, and kissed her brow and her cheeks. But then Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter, too.

“That was not kind!” said Hester. “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 Pearl, and loves thy mother, too. Wilt thou not love him?”

“Doth he 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 Hester. “But in days to come he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home 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?” inquired Pearl.

“Foolish child, what a question!” exclaimed mother. “Come, and ask his blessing!”

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favour 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. The minister – painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to admit him into the child’s kindlier 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 forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was washed off. She then remained apart, watching Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together and made arrangements as were suggested by their new position and the purposes to be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The melancholy brook would add this tale to the mystery with which its heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a bit more cheerfulness of tone than heretofore.