The Scarlet Letter: A Romance - Section 15 - The Minister's Vigil

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dream. Audio Books presents section fifteen of Scarlet Letter by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chapter twelve the Minister's vigil. Walking in the
shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually
under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mister Dimmesdale
reached the spot where, now so long since hester Prynne

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had lived through her first hours of public ignominy. The
same platform more scaffold black and weather stained with the
storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot worn
too with the tread of many culprits who had since ascended.
It remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting house.

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The Minister went up the steps. It was an obscure
night of early May, an unvaried pall of cloud muffled
the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If
the same multitude which had stood as I wisnesses while
hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth,

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they would have discerned no face above the platform, nor
hardly the outline of a human shape in the dark
gray of the midnight. But the town was all asleep.
There was no peril of discovery. The Minister might stand there,
if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in
the east, without other risk than that the dank and

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chill night air would creep into his frame and stiffen
his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with katarh
and cough, thereby defrauding the expectant audience of tomorrow's prayer
and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever
wakeful one, which had seen him in his closet wielding
the bloody scourge. Why then had he come hither? Was

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it but the mockery of penitence, a mockery, indeed, but
in which his soul trifled with itself, a mockery at
which angel blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter.
He had been driven hither by the impulse of that remorse,
which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely

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linked companion was that cowardice, which invariably drew him back
with her tremulous grip, just when the other impulse had
hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor miserable man,
what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime.
Crime is for the iron nerved, who have their choice

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either to endure it, or, if it pressed too hard,
to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good
purpose and fling it off at once. This feeble and
most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did
one thing or another which intertwined in the same inextricable
knot the agony of heaven, defying guilt and vain repentance.

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And thus, while standing on the scaffold in this vain
show of expiation, mister Dimmesdale was overcome with a great
horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at
a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart,
on that spot, in very truth, there was, and there
had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain.

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Without any effort of his will or power to restrain himself,
he shrieked aloud, an outcry that went pealing through the night,
and was beaten back from one house to another, and
reverberated from the hills in the background, as if a
company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it had made a plaything of the sound, and were

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bandying it to and fro it is done, muttered the minister,
covering his face with his hands. The whole town will
awake and hurry forth and find me here. But it
was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a
far greater power to his own startled ears than it

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actually possessed. The town did not awake, or if it did,
the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful
in a dream, or for the noise of witches, whose
voices at that period were often heard to pass over
the settlements or lonely cottages as they rode with satan
through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,

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uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of
the chamber windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at
some distance on the line of another street. He beheld
the appearance of the old magistrate himself, with a lamp
in his hand, a white night cap on his head,
and a long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked

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like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the grave. The cry
had evidently startled him. At another window of the same house,
moreover appeared Old Mistress Hippins, the Governor's sister, also with
a lamp, which, even thus far off revealed the expression
of her sour and discontented face. She thrust forward her

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head from the lattice and looked anxiously upward beyond the
shadow of a doubt. This venerable witch lady had heard
mister Dimmesdale's outcry and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night hags,
with whom she was well known to make excursions into
the forest. Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the

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old lady quickly extinguished her own and vanished. Possibly she
went up among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further
of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary observation of
the darkness, into which nevertheless he could see but little
further than he might into a millstone, retired from the window.

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The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a
long way off was approaching up the street. It threw
a gleam of recognition on here a post, and there
a garden fence, and hear a latticed window pane, and
there a pump with its full trough of water. And

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here again an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker,
and a rough log for the doorstep. The reverend mister
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced
that the doom of his existence was stealing onward in
the footsteps which he now heard, and that the gleam
of the lantern would fall upon him in a few

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moments more and reveal his long hidden secret. As the
light drew nearer, he beheld within its illuminated circle his
brother clergyman, or, to speak more accurately, his professional father,
as well as highly valued friend, the Reverend Miss Wilson, who,
as mister Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the

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bedside of some dying man, and so he had. The
good old minister came freshly from the death chamber of
Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within
that very hour, and now surrounded like the saint like
personages of olden times, with a radiant halo that glorified

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him amid this gloomy night of sin, as if the
departed governor had left him an inheritance of his glory,
or as if he had caught upon himself the distant
shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see
the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates. Now in short,
good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with

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the lighted lantern. The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to mister Dimmesdale, who smiled. They almost laughed
at them, and then wondered if he were going mad.
As the reverend mister Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm and

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holding the lantern before his breast with the other, the
minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking, a good evening
to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray
you and pass a pleasant hour with me. Good heavens,
had mister Dimmesdale actually spoken for one instant, he believed
that these words had passed his lips, but they were

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uttered only within his imagination. The Venerable Father Wilson continued
to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway
before his feet, and never once turning his head towards
the guilty platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern
had faded quite away, the minister discovered by the faintness

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which came over him that the last few moments had
been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had
made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind
of lurid playfulness. Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of
the humorous again stole in among the solemn phantoms of
his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with the

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unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should
be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning
would break and find him there. The neighborhood would begin
to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the
dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on
the place of shame and half crazed, betwixt alarm and

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curiosity would go knocking from door to door, summoning all
the people to behold the ghost as he needs must
think it of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would
flap its wings from one house to another. Then the
morning light, still waxing stronger, old patriarchs would rise up

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in great haste, each in his rannel gown and matronly dames,
without pausing to put off their night gear. The whole
tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen
with a single hair of their heads awry, would start
into public view with the disorder of a nightmare in
their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth with

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his King James's rough fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins with
some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts and
looking sourer than ever as having hardly got a wink
of sleep after her night ride. And good Father Wilson too,
after spending half the night at the deathbed and liking
ill to be disturbed thus early out of his dreams

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about the glorified saints. Hither likewise would come the elders
and deacons of mister Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins
who so idolized their minister and had made a shrine
for him in their white bosoms, which now by the bye,
in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given
themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in

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a word would come, stumbling over their thresholds and turning
up their amazed and horror stricken visages around the scaffold.
Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern light
upon his brow? Whom but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half
frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester
Prynne had stood, carried away by the grotesque horror of

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this picture, the Minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm,
burst into a great peal of laughter. It was immediately
responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which
with a thrill of the heart. But he knew not
whether of exquisite pain or pleasure. As acute he recognized

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the tones of little pearl, Pearl, little pearl, cried he,
after a moment's pause, then suppressing his voice, Hester Hester Prynne,
are you there, Yes, it is Hester Prynne, she replied
in a tone of surprise, and the Minister heard her

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footsteps approaching from the sidewalk along which she had been passing.
It is I and my little Pearl. Whence came you, Hester,
asked the Minister, what sends you hither? I have been
watching at a deathbed, answered Hester Prynne, at Governor Winthrop's deathbed,
and have taken his measure for a robe, and am

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now going homeward to my dwelling. Come up hither, Hester,
thou and little Pearl, said the Reverend, mister Dimmesdale. Ye
have both been here before, but I was not with you.
Come up hither once again, and we will stand all
three together. She silently ascended the steps and stood on

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the platform, holding Little Pearl by the hand. The minute
felt for the child's other hand and took it the
moment that he did so, there came what seemed a
tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own,
pouring like a torrent into his heart and hurrying through
all his veins, as if the mother and the child

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were communicating their vital warmth to his half torpid system.
The three formed an electric chain. Minister whispered little pearl.
What wouldst thou say, child, asked mister Dimmesdale. Wilt thou
stand here with mother and me tomorrow noontide, inquired Pearl. Nay,

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not so, my little pearl, answered the minister, For with
the new energy of the moment, all the dread of
public exposure that had so long been the anguish of
his life had returned upon him, and he was already
trembling at the conjunction, in which with a strange joy, nevertheless,
he now found himself. Not so, my child, I shall

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indeed stand with thy mother and thee one other day,
but not to morrow. Pearl laughed and attempted to pull
away her hand, but the minister held it fast a
moment longer, my child, said he. But wilt thou promise,
asked Pearl to take my hand and mother's hand to

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morrow noontide? Not then, Pearl, said the minister. But another time,
and what other time? Persisted the child At the great
judgment day, whispered the minister, And strangely enough, the sense
that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled

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him to answer the child. So then and there, before
the judgment seat thy mother and thou and I must
stand together, but the daylight of this world shall not
see our meeting pearl after again. But before mister Dimmesdale
had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over

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all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one
of those meteors which the night watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste in the vacant regions of
the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.

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The great vault lightened like the dome of an immense lamp.
It showed the familiar scene of the street with the
distinctness of mid day, but also with the awfulness that
has always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light.
The wooden houses with their jutting stories and quaint gable peaks,
the doorsteps and thresholds with the early grass springing up

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about them, the garden plots black with freshly turned earth,
the wheel track little worn, and even in the market
margined with green on either side. All were visible, but
with the singularity of aspect that seemed to give another
moral interpretation to the things of this world than they
had ever borne before. And there stood the Minister with

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his hand over his heart, and hester Prynne with the
embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom, and Little Pearl, her
self a symbol and the connecting link between those two.
They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor,
as if it were the light that is to reveal
all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who

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belonged to one another. There was witchcraft in Little Pearl's eyes,
and her face as she glanced upward at the minister,
wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish.
She withdrew her hand from mister Dimsdale's and pointed across
the street, but he clasped both his hands over his

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breast and cast his eyes toward towards the zenith. Nothing
was more common in those days than to interpret all
meteoric appearances and other natural phenomena that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon,
as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a

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blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a
sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky prefigured Indian warfare.
Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower
of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for
good or evil ever befell New England from its settlement

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down to revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not
been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not
seldom it had been seen by multitudes oftener. However, its
credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eyewitness, who
beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying and distorting medium

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of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his afterthought.
It was indeed a majestic idea that the destiny of
nations should be revealed in these awful hieroglyphics on the
cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be
deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom upon.

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The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as
betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship
of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say
when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone
on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case,

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it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered
mental state, when a man rendered morbidly self contemplative by long,
intense and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the
whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear
no more than a fitting pain, which for his soul's
history and fate we impute it therefore solely to the

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disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister,
looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of
an immense letter, the letter A marked out in lines
of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have
shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty

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imagination gave it, or at least with so little definiteness
that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
There was a singular circumstance that characterized mister Dimmesdale's psychological
state at this moment. All the time that he gazed
upward to the zenith, he was nevertheless perfectly aware. The

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little Pearl was pointing her finger towards Roger Chillingworth, who
stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The minister
appeared to see him with the same glance that discerned
them miraculous letter to his features, as to all other objects,
the meteoric light imparted a new expression. Or it might
well be that the physician was not careful, then, as

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at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which
he looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled
up the sky and disclosed the earth with an awfulness
that admonished Hester, Prynne and the clergyman of the day
of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them,
for the arch fiend standing there with a smile and

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scowl to claim his own. So vivid was the expression,
or so intense the Minister's perception of it, that it
seemed still to remain painted on the darkness after the
meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street
and all things else were at once annihilated. Who is
that man? Hester? Gasped, mister Dimmesdale, overcome with terror, I

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shiver at him. Dost thou know the man? I hate him? Herster,
She remembered her oath, and was silent. I tell THEE
my soul shivers at him, muttered the minister again. Who
is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me?
I have a nameless horror of the man, minister, said

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little Pearl. I can tell thee who he is. Quickly, then, child,
said the minister, bending his ear close to her lips,
quickly and as low as thou canst. Whisper Pearl mumbled
something into his ear that sounded indeed like human language,
but was only such gibberation as children may be heard
amusing themselves with by the hour together at all events.

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If it involved any secret information in regard to Old
Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the
erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.
The Elvish child then laughed aloud. Dost thou mock me? Now?
Said the minister. Thou hast not bold, thou wast not true?

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Answered the child, thou wouldst not promise to take my
hand and mother's hand to morrow? Nntide worthy sir, answered
the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of
the platform. Pious Master Dimmesdale, can this be you well? Well? Indeed,
we men of study, whose heads are in our books

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have need to be straightly looked after we dream in
our waking moments and walk in our sleep. Come, good, sir,
and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead
you home. How newest thou that I was here, asked
the minister, fearfully, Verily and in good faith, answered Roger Chillingworth.
I knew nothing of the matter. I had spent the

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better part of the night at the bedside of the
Worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to
give him ease. He going home to a better world.
I likewise was on my way homeward when this strange
light shone out. Come with me. I beseech you, reverend sir,
else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty
to morrow. Aha. See now how they trouble the brain,

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these books, these books You should study less, good sir,
and take a little pastime, or these night whimsies will
grow upon you. I will go home with you, said
mister Dimmesdale, with a chill despondency, like one awaking all
nerveless from an ugly dream. He yielded himself to the

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physician and was led away. The next day, however, being
the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which was held to
be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete
with heavenly influences that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls.
It is said, more souls than one were brought to
the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed

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within themselves to cherish our holy gratitude towards mister Dimsdale
throughout the long hereafter. But as he came down the
pulpit steps, the gray bearded sexton met him, holding up
a black glove, which the minister recognized as his own.
It was found, said the sexton, this morning, on the

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scaffold where evil doers are set up to public shame.
Satan dropped it there. I take it, intending a scoreless
jest against your reverence. But indeed he was blind and foolish,
as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs
no glove to cover it. Thank you, my good friend,
said the minister gravely, but startled at heart, For so

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confused was his remembrance that he had almost brought himself
to look at the events of the past night as visionary. Yes,
it seems to be my glove indeed, and since Satan
saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle
him without gloves. Henceforward, remarked the old sexton, grimly smile.

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But did your reverence hear of the portent that was
seen last night? A great read letter in the sky,
the letter A, which we interpret to stand for angel.
For as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel
this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there
should be some notice thereof No answered the Minister, I

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had not heard of it. End of Section fifteen. Dream
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