Chapter Chapter 21 · THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

. 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

deer-skins 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 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 was like

a mask; or, rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s features;

owing this dreary resemblance to 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.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen

before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some

preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and

have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance

and mien. Such a spiritual seer 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!”—the people’s victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied

her, might say to them. “Yet a little while, and she will be beyond

your reach! 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. Might there not be an

irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the

cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood

had been perpetually flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to be

presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and

exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker, or else leave an

inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith

she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.

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, no more to be

separated from her than the many-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 singular inquietude

and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer

of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of

the breast on which it is displayed. 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, who was the gem on her

mother’s unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the

emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester’s

brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than

walk by her mother’s side.

She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and

sometimes piercing music. 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 village meeting-house, than the centre of a town’s

business.

“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? See,

there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his

Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be 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