keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20

#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 update#
#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 professional#
#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 series#
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It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.

#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 series#

As he drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves. He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled over the same ground, only two days before. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable activity that astonished him. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward journey. Dimmesdale’s feelings as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. “At least, they shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I leave no public duty unperformed or ill–performed!” Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character.

#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 professional#

Nevertheless-to hold nothing back from the reader-it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election Sermon and, as such an occasion formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal. “This is most fortunate!” he had then said to himself. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present. The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. Hester Prynne-whose vocation, as a self–enlisted Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew-could take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days’ time would sail for Bristol. In futherance of this choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour one of those unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. Not to speak of the clergyman’s health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement the higher the state the more delicately adapted to it the man. It had been determined between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered thinly along the sea–board.

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In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure. So the minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed! And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook-now that the intrusive third person was gone-and taking her old place by her mother’s side. But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree–trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth’s heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a single hour’s rest and solace. So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be received as real.

#Keep it a secret from your mother chapter 20 update#

You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!Īs the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser.