XXI

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.

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 back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; some preternaturally gifted observer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. “Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer! A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn on her bosom!” Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester’s mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.

Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. 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 gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child’s apparel, was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester’s simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood. Children have always a sympathy in 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 betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester’s brow.

When they reached the market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot.

“Why, what is this, mother?” cried she. “Wherefore have all the people left their work today? Is it a play-day for the whole world?”

“They wait to see the procession pass,” said Hester. “For the Governor 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 brook-side?”

“He will be there, child,” answered her mother, “but he will not greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him.”

“What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. “In the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, he talks with thee! And he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it off ! But, here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his heart!”

“Be quiet, Pearl – thou understandest not these things,” said her mother. “Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is everybody’s face to-day, for a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world!”

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud old London, might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth – the statesman, the priest, and the soldier – seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence. All came forth to move in procession before the people’s eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James – no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled – grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling matches were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians – in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts, feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear – stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as 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 humours 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, or a sword. They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle’s very nose and quafing at their pleasure draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket flasks. It remarkably characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.

But the sea in those old times heaved and foamed very much at its own will, subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer, even in the full career of his reckless life, was not regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders smiled not unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled idly through the marketplace; until happening to approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognise, and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area – 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. Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard.

“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 be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of apothecary’s stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel.”

“What mean you?” inquired Hester, startled “Have you another passenger?”

“Why, know you not,” cried the shipmaster, “that this physician here – Chillingworth he calls himself – is minded to try my cabin-fare with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party, and a 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 the mariner and Hester Prynne. But at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the remotest corner of the market-place and smiling on her; a smile which – across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter of the crowd – conveyed secret and fearful meaning.