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CHAPTER 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, 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 sneer 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 to-day? 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 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 led'st 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 yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old
trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee,
sitting on a heap of moss! 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. The children have
come from their schools, and the grown people from their
workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy, for, to-day,
a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as has been
the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered--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--as it already was, and continued to be during the
greater part of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever
mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human
infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that,
for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more
grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.
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. Had they followed their hereditary
taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events
of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and
processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the
observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation
with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant
embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such
festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this
kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what
they had beheld in proud old London--we will not say at a royal
coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show--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, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,
were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner, there
was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted most
interest of all--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. Their
immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants,
wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the
national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not
sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the
forgotten art of gaiety.
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, red and yellow ochre, and 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, and in some instances, a sword.
From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes
which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal
ferocity. They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules
of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco
under the beadle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost
a townsman a shilling; and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts
of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket flasks, which they freely
tendered to the gaping crowd around them. 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. The sailor of that day would go
near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. 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, swelled, and foamed very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind,
with hardly any attempts at regulation
by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his
calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity and
piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life,
was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to
traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their
black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, 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.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far
as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He
wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his
hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted
with a feather. There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on
his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed
anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly
have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them
both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question
before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or
imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as
pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol
ship strolled idly through the market-place; 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. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which
the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own
reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so
unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never
before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the
seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard; and so
changed was Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the
matron in town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have
held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.
"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 more than she
permitted to appear. "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 comer of the market-place and smiling on
her; a smile which--across the wide and bustling square, and
through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods,
and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret and fearful
meaning.
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