XXI.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.
Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was toreceive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne andlittle Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged withthe craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, inconsiderable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures,whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of theforest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of thecolony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven yearspast, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more byits hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it hadthe effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline;while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilightindistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its ownillumination. Her face, so long familiar to the towns-people, showedthe marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It waslike a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman'sfeatures; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester wasactually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departedout of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseenbefore, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless somepreternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, andhave afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenanceand mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, aftersustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years asa necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion toendure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely andvoluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into akind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and itswearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as theyfancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will bebeyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious oceanwill quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burnupon her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to beassigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret inHester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedomfrom 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 nearlyall her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine oflife, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich,delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker; or elseleave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitternesswherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensestpotency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossibleto guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence tothe shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and sodelicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel,was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, inimparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. Thedress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, orinevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, nomore to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from abutterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a brightflower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one ideawith her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certainsingular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing somuch as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with thevaried throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Childrenhave always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them;always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, ofwhatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who wasthe gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance ofher spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marblepassiveness of Hester's brow.
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, ratherthan walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of awild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reachedthe market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving thestir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more likethe broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than thecentre of a town's business.
"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she. "Wherefore have all the peopleleft 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 hisSabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if anykind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, theold 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; forthou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see,mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, andsailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-place?"
"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governorand the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the greatpeople and good people, with the music and the soldiers marchingbefore them."
"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl. "And will he hold outboth his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from thebrook-side?"
"He will be there, child," answered her mother. "But he will not greetthee to-day; nor must thou greet him."
"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking partlyto herself. "In the dark night-time he calls us to him, and holds thyhand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder. Andin the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the stripof sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And hekisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash itoff! But here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows usnot; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his handalways over his heart!"
"Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said hermother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and seehow cheery is everybody's face to-day. The children have come fromtheir schools, and the grown people from their workshops and theirfields, on purpose to be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning torule over them; and so--as has been the custom of mankind ever since anation was first gathered--they make merry and rejoice; as if a goodand golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world!"
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity thatbrightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of theyear--as it already was, and continued to be during the greater partof two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and publicjoy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so fardispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a singleholiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communitiesat a period of general affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedlycharacterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in themarket-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance ofPuritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had livedin the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the lifeof England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been asstately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Hadthey followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers wouldhave illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have beenimpracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combinemirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesqueand brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,at such festivals, puts on. There was some sh
adow of an attempt ofthis kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the politicalyear of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a rememberedsplendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they hadbeheld 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 ourforefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation ofmagistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--thestatesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then toassume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance withantique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or socialeminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people'seye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of agovernment so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, inrelaxing the severe and close application to their various modes ofrugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same pieceand material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of theapplicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in theEngland of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of atheatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, norgleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricksof mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude withjests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by theirappeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All suchprofessors of the several branches of jocularity would have beensternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by thegeneral sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however,the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, butwidely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists hadwitnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on thevillage-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep aliveon this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that wereessential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions ofCornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about themarket-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout atquarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on theplatform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters ofdefence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business wasbroken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea ofpermitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse ofone of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being thenin the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sireswho had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would comparefavorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, evenat so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, thegeneration next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade ofPuritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all thesubsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet tolearn again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tintwas the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yetenlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in theirsavage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts,red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrowand stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexiblegravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wildas were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of thescene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by somemariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the SpanishMain,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. Theywere rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and animmensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about thewaist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, andsustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. Frombeneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf gleamed eyes which, evenin good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. Theytransgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that werebinding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; andquaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae frompocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd aroundthem. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age,rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class,not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deedson their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to bearraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, forinstance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimensof the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilledall their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed, verymuch at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, withhardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on thewave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, aman of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of hisreckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it wasdisreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritanelders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crownedhats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment ofthese jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise noranimadversion, when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close andfamiliar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far asapparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore aprofusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold-lace on his hat, whichwas 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 displaythan hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown thisface, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, withoutundergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurringfine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. Asregarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining tothe character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol shipstrolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approachthe spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize,and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case whereverHester stood, a small vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formeditself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing oneanother at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed tointrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which thescarlet 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 answereda good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak togetherwithout risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne'srepute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent forrigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less resultof scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make readyone more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy orship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this otherdoctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, asthere is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with aSpanish vessel."
"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted toappear. "Have you another passenger?"
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physicianhere--Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-farewith you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is ofyour party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he thatis in peril from these sour old Puritan ru
lers!"
Chillingworth,--"Smile with a sinister meaning"]
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien ofcalmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelttogether."
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, atthat instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing inthe remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smilewhich--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talkand laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of thecrowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
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