old, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of
seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits
who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of
the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud
muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same
multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne
sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they
would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the
outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But the
town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister
might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden
in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air
would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism,
and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see
him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet,
wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but
the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul
trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while
fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by
the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own
sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which
invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the
other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor,
miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with
crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to
endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage
strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and
most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one
thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot,
the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. 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, in very truth, there was, and
there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of