"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.