XXI.-THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.

etimes 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.etimesOn 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 towns-people, 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 seer might
have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude
through seven 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 life-long 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 forever the symbol which ye
have caused to burn upon 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 flavored? 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 gayety. 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 ledst 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 night-time 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 splendor, a
colorless 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—deemed
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 or 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 applicances 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 hundreds of 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 gives 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 favorably, 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 gayety.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
deer-skin 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 humors 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 behavior 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-vitæ from pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the
gaping crowd around them. 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 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 unfavorable 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 clamor 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 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 recognize, 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 corner 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.