The Minister's Vigil

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 bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went
pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as
if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to
and fro.

"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.