Dimmesdale's Midnight Vigil

On an obscure night in early May, seven years after Hester Prynne's public shaming, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, walking in the shadow of a dream and perhaps under the influence of a species of somnambulism, reached the same scaffold that had once held Hester. The platform, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of those long years, and foot-worn with the tread of many culprits, remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps, driven by the impulse of Remorse that dogged him everywhere, yet held back by the Cowardice that was its closely linked companion. He had been driven to the verge of disclosure, but lacked the iron nerve to complete it; his was a feeble and most sensitive spirit, intertwining the agony of heaven-defying guilt with vain repentance in the same inextricable knot.

The Solitary Vigil and the Cry in the Night

Standing on the scaffold in this vain show of expiation, Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, there had long been the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud, an outcry that went pealing through the night, beaten back from house to house and reverberating from the hills, as if a company of devils had made a plaything of the sound. The town did not awake, however; the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry for something frightful in a dream or for the noise of witches riding with Satan through the air. The minister, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. He saw Governor Bellingham at a chamber window with a lamp, looking like a ghost evoked from the grave, and old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, who thrust her head from a lattice and looked anxiously upward, interpreting the cry as the clamour of fiends and night-hags with whom she was known to make excursions in the forest. The minister grew comparatively calm, but was soon greeted by a little glimmering light approaching up the street. It was the Reverend Mr. Wilson, coming freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. As Wilson passed beside the scaffold, Dimmesdale could hardly restrain himself from speaking, but the words were uttered only within his imagination. The crisis of terrible anxiety passed, and shortly afterwards, a grisly sense of the humorous stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. Carried away by the grotesque horror of the picture he imagined of the town discovering him at dawn, the minister burst into a great peal of laughter, which was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh—the tones of little Pearl.

The Reunion on the Scaffold

Hester Prynne, who had been watching at Governor Winthrop's death-bed and had taken his measure for a robe, was passing by with Pearl. At Dimmesdale's call, she silently ascended the steps and stood on the platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand and took it. The moment he did so, there came a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain. Pearl asked if he would stand there with them at noontide the next day, but the minister, with all the dread of public exposure returning upon him, answered that he would stand with them at the great judgment day, but that the daylight of this world should not see their meeting. Before he had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky—a meteor, so powerful that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud, showing the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day, but with an awfulness imparted by the unaccustomed light. There stood the minister with his hand over his heart, Hester with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom, and little Pearl, herself a symbol and the connecting link between those two. Looking upward to the zenith, the minister beheld the appearance of an immense letter A marked out in lines of dull red light, a vision his guilty imagination gave to the meteor. At the same time, he was perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The meteoric light imparted a new expression to the physician's features, revealing the malevolence with which he looked upon his victim. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror, gasped to Hester, "Who is that man? I shiver at him! I hate him, Hester!" But she remembered her oath and was silent. Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded like gibberish, and then laughed aloud. Chillingworth, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform, addressed the minister with feigned concern, claiming he had been at Governor Winthrop's bedside and was on his way home. With a chill despondency, like one awakening from an ugly dream, Dimmesdale yielded himself to the physician and was led away.

Consequences and Aftermath

The next day, being the Sabbath, Dimmesdale preached a discourse held to be the richest and most powerful that had ever proceeded from his lips, bringing souls to the truth. But as he came down the pulpit steps, the sexton met him, holding up a black glove that had been found that morning on the scaffold. The minister, startled at heart, recognised it as his own. The sexton remarked that Satan had dropped it there, intending a scurrilous jest, and asked if the minister had heard of the portent seen the previous night—a great red letter A in the sky, which the people interpreted to stand for Angel, because Governor Winthrop had been made an angel that night. Dimmesdale answered that he had not heard of it. The vigil had a profound effect on Hester Prynne as well. In her late singular interview with Dimmesdale, she was shocked at the condition to which she found him reduced; his nerve seemed absolutely destroyed, his moral force abased into more than childish weakness. Knowing the hidden circumstances, she could readily infer that a terrible machinery had been brought to bear on him. She decided that he had a right to her utmost aid, and resolved to meet her former husband, Roger Chillingworth, to do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had set his gripe. The vigil thus became the catalyst for Hester's determination to reveal Chillingworth's true identity to Dimmesdale, setting in motion the events that would lead to the forest meeting and the eventual public revelation of the minister's sin.