Chillingworth's Death and Bequest

Roger Chillingworth's death, occurring within the year after Arthur Dimmesdale's public confession on the scaffold, brought a sudden and complete collapse of the man who had for seven years lived only for revenge. All his strength and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—deserted him at once; he positively withered up, shrivelled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed lying wilting in the sun. The principle of his life had been the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge, and when that evil principle achieved its completest triumph, it was left with no further material to support it. With no more devil's work on earth for him to do, the unhumanised mortal could only betake himself whither his master would find him tasks enough and pay him his wages duly.

The Bequest to Pearl

By his last will and testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend John Wilson were executors, Chillingworth bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both in England and in New England, to little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne. This legacy transformed Pearl—the elf-child, the demon offspring, as some people up to that epoch persisted in considering her—into the richest heiress of her day in the New World. The inheritance wrought a very material change in public estimation; had mother and child remained in Boston, Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them all.

The Disappearance of Hester and Pearl

In no long time after the physician's death, the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many years, though a vague report would now and then find its way across the sea—like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it—no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend, its spell still potent, keeping the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt.

Hester's Return and the Fate of Pearl

Years later, Hester Prynne returned alone to the cottage, took up her long-forsaken shame, and resumed the scarlet letter of her own free will. But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must then have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave, or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness. Through the remainder of Hester's life, however, there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at the impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant thus apparelled been shown to the sober-hued community. The gossips of that day believed—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed, and one of his recent successors in office faithfully believes—that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother, and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

Thematic Significance

Chillingworth's death and bequest complete the arc of his transformation from a wronged husband into a fiend, and then into a figure whose final act—however ambiguous—provides for the child of the sin he had spent years punishing. The legacy liberates Pearl from the poverty and social ostracism that had defined her childhood, and it severs the last legal and material connection between Hester and her former husband. Philosophically, the narrator suggests, hatred and love may be the same thing at bottom, each requiring a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge, each leaving the passionate lover or the no less passionate hater forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of its subject. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.