Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it,—when, in short, there was no more devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances,—as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions—we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.

Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate to the reader. 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 life, 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 vague report would now and then find its way across the sea,—like a shapeless piece of driftwood tost 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 legend. Its spell, however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore, 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 once been opened; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments,—and, at all events, went in.

On the threshold she paused,—turned partly round,—for, perchance, the idea of entering, all alone, and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. 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 fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened 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 some 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 of a continual remembrance, that must 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 apparelled, been shown to our sobre-hued community.

In fine, the gossips of that day believed,—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed,—and one of his recent 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 entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here 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 afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, —or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because un-valued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and 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 eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old 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 right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments 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 herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—

ENDNOTES

1
(p. 5)
Old Manse:
Hawthorne previously displayed an “autobiographical impulse” in the essay “The Old Manse,” subtitled “The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with his Abode,” which appears in
Mosses from an Old Manse
(1846). The sketch is similar in style and tone to “The Custom-House.”

2
(p. 5)
Memoirs of
P. P.,
Clerk of this Parish:
The reference is one of many tongue-in-cheek reflections on the author’s literary output and style in “The Custom-House.” “Memoirs” parodied the long-winded, pompous autobiography
History of
my
Own Times
(1723) by Bishop Gilbert Burnet. The parody appeared in
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus,
a collection of satirical pieces written, without individual attribution, by John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift as The Scriblerus Club.

3
(p. 6)
tales that make up my volume:
Hawthorne originally intended to publish “The Custom-House” and
The Scarlet Letter
in a collection with several additional short works.

4
(p. 6) old King Derby: The reference is to Elias Hasket Derby (1739-1799), who initiated trade with the Orient from the port of Salem.

5
(p. 9)
Loco-foco Surveyor:
“Loco-foco” initially referred to the radical wing of the Democratic party. Whigs appropriated the term from conservative Democrats and applied it pejoratively toward Democrats in general and, at the time of his removal from the customhouse, toward Hawthorne in particular.

6
(p. 9)
emigrant of my name:
This was William Hathome, who traveled to Massachusetts from England in 1630 and settled in Salem shortly after, where he was revered as a magistrate and society elder. Hathorne sentenced those who transgressed Salem’s mores to such punishments as having one’s tongue bored with a hot iron or one’s ear lopped off at the same time Hathome operated a still for “strong waters.” Nathaniel Hawthorne changed the spelling of his familial name.

7
(p. 10)
a woman of their sect:
The woman in question was Anne Coleman, who was dragged half naked behind a cart, flogged, and driven into the forest.

8
(p. 10)
left a stain upon him:
William Hathorne’s son John, another judge and patriarch of Puritan society, participated in the preliminary phases of the witch trials of 1692.

9
(p. 12)
as chief executive officer of the Custom-House:
Hawthorne was appointed Surveyor of the Salem Custom House in 1846, during the administration of President James K. Polk. Although Hawthorne’s term was to have lasted four years, he was removed after only three, following widespread Whig victories in the elections of 1848.

10
(p. 13)
General Miller:
General James F. Miller, a hero of the War of 1812, would have been seventy years old when Hawthorne became surveyor.

11
(p. 16)
a certain permanent Inspector:
William Lee had been inspector since 1814 and was in his late seventies when Hawthorne took office.

12
(p. 21)
“I’ll try, Sir!”
: Miller reportedly responded with these words to a battle order that he gain control of a British battery near Niagara Falls.

13
(p. 22)
new idea of talent:
Hawthorne is referring to his friend Zachariah Burchmore, who also lost his office when the Whig administration took over.

14
(p. 23)
Brook Farm:
This was a cooperative agrarian community founded by a Unitarian minister, George Ripley, in 1841 as a utopian alternative to an increasingly industrialized and materialistic society. Hawthorne invested in and joined the community in its first year of existence but left after seven months, finding that the hard physical labor demanded by communal living sapped his literary powers. He later sued to have his investment returned.

15
(p. 23)
Emerson’s:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, at whose family homestead Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne lived for three years, articulated the Transcendentalist beliefs embraced by Brook Farm’s founders.

16
(p. 23)
Ellery Channing:
William Ellery Channing was a young poet of modest output whose brief stay at Brook Farm overlapped with Hawthorne’s.

17
(p. 23)
Thoreau
and
Walden:
The reference is to the writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who described, in
Walden,
or
Life in the Woods
(1854), his experience of living in a self-built cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts.

18
(p. 23)
Hillard’s culture:
George Stillman Hillard, a Boston lawyer who also pursued literary interests and offered political and financial assistance to Hawthorne, was a life-long friend of the latter.

19
(p. 23)
Longfellow’s hearth-stone:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a class-mate of Hawthorne’s at Bowdoin College in Maine and had already achieved recognition in 1837, when he wrote an extremely favorable review of Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
(1837).

20
(p. 23)
Alcott:
Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, was a philosopher and teacher who pursued his idealist vision by founding the utopian community Fruitlands.

21
(p. 23)
Surveyor of the Revenue:
As surveyor, Hawthorne was responsible for determining the customs duty on imported goods.

22
(p. 24)
of Bums or of Chaucer:
The Scottish poet Robert Burns served briefly as an excise officer, and Geoffrey Chaucer served for twelve years as a customs officer in London.