Chương Chương 18 · A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope

and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of

horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but

dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for

so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had

habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether

foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,

in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the

untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a

colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had

their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as

the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this

estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or

legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence

than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe,

the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of

her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was

her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame,

Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and

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, not of

principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched

with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts—for those it was easy to

arrange—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, its principles, and even its

prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed

him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all

alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he

might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had

never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven

years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation

for this very 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 he was broken down by long and

exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the

very remorse which harrowed it; 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

and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,

finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,

sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and

sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom

which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that

the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in

this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded, so that the

enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even in

his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to

that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined

wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over

again his unforgotten triumph.

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 that

earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now—since I am irrevocably

doomed—wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the

condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a

better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer

prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her

companionship; so powerful is she to sustain—so 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 once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its

flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the

exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of

his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,

unchristianised, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were, 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, wondering at himself. “Methought the

germ of it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem

to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down upon

these forest leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new

powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! 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, and make it as if it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and,

taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered

leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream.

With a hand’s-breadth further flight, it would have fallen into the

water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward,

besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about.

But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,

which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted

by strange 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 formal 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, and imparting the charm of softness to her

features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, 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 whole richness of her beauty, came

back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves

with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic

circle of this hour. 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, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the

sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each

green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming

adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a

shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little

brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of

mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen 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. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been

bright in Hester’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s!

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen

her—yes, I know it!—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?” asked the

minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children, because

they often show a distrust—a backwardness to be familiar with me. I

have even been afraid of little Pearl!”

“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But she will love thee

dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her. Pearl!

Pearl!”

“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in a

streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So

thou thinkest the child will love me?”

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some

distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled

vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of

boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or

distinct—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit—as the

splendour went and came again. 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 as it showed

itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into

its bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew

how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to welcome

her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding

autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood

upon the withered leaves. 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, indeed, 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 pigeon,

alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a

sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty depths

of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment—for the

squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is

hard to distinguish between his moods—so he chattered at the child, and

flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year’s nut, and already

gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light

footstep on the leaves, 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—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the

improbable—came up and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage

head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the

mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised

a kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the

settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The flowers appeared to know it,

and one and another whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with me,

thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—and, to please them,

Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some

twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her

eyes. With these she decorated her hair and her young waist, and became

a nymph child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest

sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned

herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly back.

Slowly—for she saw the clergyman!

XIX.