The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical
energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway
among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude
natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he
remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the
plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush,
climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable
activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled
over the same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the
town, he took an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not
yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago,
since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace
of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of
the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a
weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not
the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of
change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he
met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the
little town. They looked neither older nor younger now; the
beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe
of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on
whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the
minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their
mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as
he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so
very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr.
Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had
seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,
indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a
change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might
have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for
whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn
into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,
his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not
flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no
doubt, would still have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the
man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.