The Scarlet Letter

"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 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,

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 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 Hibbins, the

Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far off

revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She

thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously

upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady

had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its

multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the

fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make

excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the 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 mill-stone--retired from the

window.

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 here

a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough

of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron

knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr.

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 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 Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr.

Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the 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 personage of olden times, with a

radiant halo, that glorified 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 a

lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the

above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled--nay, almost

laughed at them--and then wondered if he was going mad.