After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange
their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was
more than one account of what had been witnessed on the
scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast
of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of
that worn by Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded
its origin there were various explanations, all of which must
necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne
first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance--which he afterwards, in so many futile methods,
followed out--by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others
contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long
time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of
magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again and those best able to
appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body--whispered their
belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active
tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and
at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible
presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these
theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,
erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation
has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were
spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have
removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that
there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a
new-born infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying words
acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any--the
slightest--connexion on his part, with the guilt for which
Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to
these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that
he was dying--conscious, also, that the reverence of the
multitude placed him already among saints and angels--had
desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen
woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the
choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in
his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner
of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the
mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite
Purity, we are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the
holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as
to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and
repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would
look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous,
we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's
story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a
man's friends--and especially a clergyman's--will sometimes
uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine
on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained
creature of the dust.