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!