The Scarlet Letter

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely

muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and 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 Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one

instant he believed that these words had passed his lips. But

they were 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 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 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 neighbourhood 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 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 in great haste, each in his flannel 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 his King James' ruff

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 a death-bed,

and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams

about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the

elders and deacons of Mr. 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 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!