THE SCARLET LETTER

I.

THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey

steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and

others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door

of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and

happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it

among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the

virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the

forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the

vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first

burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which

subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in

the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen

or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was

already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which

gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The

rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique

than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime,

it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice,

and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot,

much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly

vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that

had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But

on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a

wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,

which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to

the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came

forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity

and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;

but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so

long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally

overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,

it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as

she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.

Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now

about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do

otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader.

It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that

may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale

of human frailty and sorrow.

II.

THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer

morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty

large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently

fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population,

or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity

that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would

have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened

nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on

whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of

public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character,

an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might

be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his

parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at

the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other

heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle

or vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s firewater had made riotous

about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the

forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the

bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on

the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion

and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so

thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public

discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and

cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such

bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our

days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then

be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death

itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story

begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the

crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal

infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much

refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of

petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and

wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the

throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as

materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old

English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated

from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that

chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child

a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter

physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her

own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within

less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had

been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were

her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a

moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their

composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad

shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that

had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or

thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a

boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them

seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in

respect to its purport or its volume of tone.

“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece

of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women,

being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the

handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye,

gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are

now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as

the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not.”

“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her

godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal

should have come upon his congregation.”

“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch—that

is a truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they

should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.

Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she—the

naughty baggage—little will she care what they put upon the bodice of

her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like

heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!”

“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by

the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be

always in her heart.”

“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown

or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest as

well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This woman

has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for

it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then

let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if

their own wives and daughters go astray.”

“Mercy on us, goodwife!” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no

virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the

gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush now, gossips for the lock

is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.”

The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in

the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim

and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and

his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and

represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic

code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and

closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official

staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young

woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the

prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity

and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own

free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months

old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid

light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it

acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a dungeon, or other

darksome apartment of the prison.

When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed

before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant

closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection,

as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or

fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one

token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the

baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and

a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople

and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth,

surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of

gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and

with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had

all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which

she wore, and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of

the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary

regulations of the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large

scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the

sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from

regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the

impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was

ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those

days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the

delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised

as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike,

in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the

prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her

dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even

startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the

misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true

that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful

in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in

prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express

the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by

its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all

eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and

women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now

impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET

LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It

had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations

with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of

her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,

contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to

laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of

what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”

“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “if we

stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for

the red letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow a rag

of mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!”

“Oh, peace, neighbours—peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do

not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she

has felt it in her heart.”

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. “Make way, good

people—make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open a passage; and I

promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child

may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour

past meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts,

where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame

Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!”

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded

by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed

men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the

place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious

schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it

gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads

continually to stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms,

and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance,

in those days, from the prison door to the market-place. Measured by

the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of

some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent

an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if

her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and

trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike

marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the

intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the

pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore,

Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a

sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It

stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and

appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which

now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and

traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as

effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was

the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the

platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that

instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in

its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal

of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood

and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common

nature—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual—no outrage more

flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it

was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne’s instance,

however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she

should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing

that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to

which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing

well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus

displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man’s

shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen

in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and

with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of

Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one

another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but

only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose

infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest

sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that

the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty, and the more

lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest

the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society

shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.

The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond

their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had

that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none

of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a

theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a

disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been

repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less

dignified than the governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a

general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a

balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such

personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking

the majesty, or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be

inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest

and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The

unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the

heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and

concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an

impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter

the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in

every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible

in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to

behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment,

and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the

multitude—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child,

contributing their individual parts—Hester Prynne might have repaid

them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden

infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if

she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast

herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the

most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,

glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped

and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was

preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this

roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western

wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the

brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling

and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish

quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came

swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was

gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as

another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.

Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself

by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight

and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view

that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had

been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable

eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her

paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken

aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the

portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with

its bold brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the

old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of

heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and

which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a

gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own face,

glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the

dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld

another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin,

scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that

had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same

bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their

owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and

the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall,

was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the

right. Next rose before her in memory’s picture-gallery, the intricate

and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals,

and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of

a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion

with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn

materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in

lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the

Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling

their stern regards at Hester Prynne—yes, at herself—who stood on the

scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in

scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.

Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that

it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet

letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the

infant and the shame were real. Yes these were her realities—all else

had vanished!

III.

THE RECOGNITION

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and

universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length

relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which

irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his native

garb was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent

visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have

attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would

he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the

Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood

a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage

costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could

hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his

features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it

could not fail to mould the physical to itself and become manifest by

unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of

his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the

peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of

this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first

instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the

figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force

that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not

seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,

the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at

first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom

external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear

relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look

became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across

his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one

little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His

face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so

instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a

single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a

brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally

subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of

Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to

recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture

with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.

Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he

addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:

“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is

she here set up to public shame?”

“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the

townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion,

“else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her

evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly

Master Dimmesdale’s church.”

“You say truly,” replied the other; “I am a stranger, and have been a

wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by

sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk

to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be

redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me

of Hester Prynne’s—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s offences,

and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”

“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your

troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find

yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and

punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New

England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain

learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam,

whence some good time agone he was minded to cross over and cast in his

lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife

before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.

Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a

dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman,

Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own

misguidance—”

“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger with a bitter smile. “So

learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his

books. And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder

babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which Mistress

Prynne is holding in her arms?”

“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who

shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madame

Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid

their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands

looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that

God sees him.”

“The learned man,” observed the stranger with another smile, “should

come himself to look into the mystery.”

“It behoves him well if he be still in life,” responded the townsman.

“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves

that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly

tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband

may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in

force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty

thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart they

have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the

platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of

her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

“A wise sentence,” remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his head.

“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious

letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that

the partner of her iniquity should not at least, stand on the scaffold

by her side. But he will be known—he will be known!—he will be known!”

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a

few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the

crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,

still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger—so fixed a gaze that, at

moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world

seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps,

would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did,

with the hot mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up

its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the

sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a

festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in

the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or

beneath a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was

conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It

was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to

greet him face to face—they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were,

to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection

should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely

heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once,

in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.

“Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” said the voice.

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which

Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to

the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to

be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the

ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here,

to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham

himself with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a

guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of

embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath—a gentleman

advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He

was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community

which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of

development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and

tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age;

accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so

little. The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was

surrounded were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a

period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness

of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.

But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to

select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less

capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and

disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect

towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious,

indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and

warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the

balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and

famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,

like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of

kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less

carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth,

rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he

stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his

grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking,

like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked

like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes

of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would

have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human

guilt, passion, and anguish.

“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young

brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been

privileged to sit”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a

pale young man beside him—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly

youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and

before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people,

as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your

natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments

to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over

your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide

the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes

to me—with a young man’s over-softness, albeit wise beyond his

years—that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to

lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of

so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay

in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What

say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I,

that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?”

There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the

balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport,

speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect

towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:

“Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsibility of this woman’s

soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to

repentance and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the

Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—young clergyman, who had come from one of the

great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into

our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already

given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person

of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow;

large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he

forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both

nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint. Notwithstanding

his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air

about this young minister—an apprehensive, a startled, a

half-frightened look—as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and

at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease

in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would

permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple

and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and

fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said,

affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor

had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in

the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred

even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the

blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.

“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to

her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to

thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it

seemed, and then came forward.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down

steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and

seest the accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be

for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be

made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name

of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any

mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though

he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on

thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty

heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt

him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath

granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an

open triumph over the evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take

heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to

grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now

presented to thy lips!”

The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken.

The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct

purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and

brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby

at Hester’s bosom was affected by the same influence, for it directed

its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little

arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the

minister’s appeal that the people could not believe but that Hester

Prynne would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one

himself in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth

by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the

scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the

Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath

been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou

hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to

take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”

“Never,” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into

the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply

branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony

as well as mine!”

“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from

the crowd about the scaffold, “Speak; and give your child a father!”

“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but

responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised. “And my

child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly

one!”

“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the

balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his

appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength

and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the

elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,

addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but

with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he

dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods

were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new terrors in

their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames

of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the

pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.

She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her

temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense

suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a

stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life

remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered

remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the

latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and

screams; she strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to

sympathise with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led

back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its

iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her

that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way

of the interior.

IV.

THE INTERVIEW

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a

state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest

she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied

mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible

to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master

Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He

described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical

science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could

teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.

To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not

merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child—who,

drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in

with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the

mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a

forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester

Prynne had borne throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that

individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of

such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged

in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most

convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates

should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom.

His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after

ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the

comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had

immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to

moan.

“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the

practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in

your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more

amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore.”

“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett,

“I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath

been like a possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in

hand, to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of

the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his

demeanour change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face

to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had

intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care

was given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the

trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other

business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully,

and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from

beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of

which he mingled with a cup of water.

“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a

year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of

simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the

medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none of

mine—neither will she recognise my voice or aspect as a father’s.

Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with

strongly marked apprehension into his face. “Wouldst thou avenge

thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.

“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly.

“What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The

medicine is potent for good, and were it my child—yea, mine own, as

well as thine! I could do no better for it.”

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind,

he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught.

It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge. The moans

of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually

ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after

relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The

physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his

attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her

pulse, looked into her eyes—a gaze that made her heart shrink and

shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold—and, finally,

satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.

“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many

new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them—a recipe that an

Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as

old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless

conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and

heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous

sea.”

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest

look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and

questioning as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her

slumbering child.

“I have thought of death,” said she—“have wished for it—would even have

prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything.

Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou

beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips.”

“Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost

thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so

shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do

better for my object than to let thee live—than to give thee medicines

against all harm and peril of life—so that this burning shame may still

blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the

scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast,

as if it had been red hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and

smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the

eyes of men and women—in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy

husband—in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take

off this draught.”

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup,

and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed,

where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the

room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but

tremble at these preparations; for she felt that—having now done all

that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty,

impelled him to do for the relief of physical suffering—he was next to

treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably

injured.

“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into

the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy

on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly,

and thy weakness. I—a man of thought—the book-worm of great libraries—a

man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry

dream of knowledge—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine

own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the

idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young

girl’s fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own

behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I

came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of

Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself,

Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.

Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a

married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter

blazing at the end of our path!”

“Thou knowest,” said Hester—for, depressed as she was, she could not

endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame—“thou knowest

that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.”

“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that

epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless!

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and

chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed

not so wild a dream—old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as

I was—that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all

mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee

into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by

the warmth which thy presence made there!”

“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.

“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong,

when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation

with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and

philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.

Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the

man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”

“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.

“That thou shalt never know!”

“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and

self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there

are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in

the invisible sphere of thought—few things hidden from the man who

devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a

mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude.

Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even

as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy

heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come

to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this

man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold in alchemy.

There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him

tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or

later, he must needs be mine.”

The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that

Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should

read the secret there at once.

“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he,

with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He

bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I

shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I

shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own

loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine

that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame,

if as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide

himself in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!”

“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled; “but

thy words interpret thee as a terror!”

“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,”

continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.

Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe

not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on

this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere

a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a

man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest

ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate: no matter whether of

right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is

where thou art and where he is. But betray me not!”

“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly

knew why, from this secret bond. “Why not announce thyself openly, and

cast me off at once?”

“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonour

that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other

reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,

therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom

no tidings shall ever come. Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by

look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of.

Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life

will be in my hands. Beware!”

“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.

“Swear it!” rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was

hereafter to be named, “I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and

the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to

wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and

hideous dreams?”

“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the

expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the

forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove

the ruin of my soul?”

“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”

V.

HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door

was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling

on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no

other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps

there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from

the threshold of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle

that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at

which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was

supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the

combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the

scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and

insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,

therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength

that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that

condemned her—a giant of stern features but with vigour to support, as

well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up through the

terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk

from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she must either

sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,

or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help

her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with

it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial,

and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne.

The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same

burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling

down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their

misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her

individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the

preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and

embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the

young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter

flaming on her breast—at her, the child of honourable parents—at her,

the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a woman—at her, who had

once been innocent—as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And

over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her

only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no

restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan

settlement, so remote and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place,

or to any other European land, and there hide her character and

identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into

another state of being—and having also the passes of the dark,

inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might

assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from

the law that had condemned her—it may seem marvellous that this woman

should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must

needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so

irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost

invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like,

the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to

their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge

that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had

struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger

assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so

uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s

wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even

that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless

maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping, like garments put

off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound

her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could

never be broken.

It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from

herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a

serpent from its hole—it might be that another feeling kept her within

the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode,

the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union that,

unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of

final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint

futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of

souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at

the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove

to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and

hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to

believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a

resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion.

Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here

should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the

torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out

another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because

the result of martyrdom.

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,

within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any

other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built

by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too

sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of

the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of

the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea

at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby

trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the

cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which

would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this

little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed,

and by the licence of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial

watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A

mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.

Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut

out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to

behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the

doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the

pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her

breast, would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.

Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who

dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She

possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded

comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her

thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then, as now, almost the

only one within a woman’s grasp—of needle-work. She bore on her breast,

in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and

imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have

availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of

human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the

sable simplicity that generally characterised the Puritanic modes of

dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of

her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was

elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its

influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many

fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.

Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of

magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a

new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of

policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a

sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought

bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to

the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and were readily

allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while

sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian

order. In the array of funerals, too—whether for the apparel of the

dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth

and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent and

characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne could supply.

Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another

possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be

termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so

miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a

fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever

other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,

on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester

really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is

certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many

hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,

chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and

state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her

needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it

on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s

little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the

coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance,

her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to cover

the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever

relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the

plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple

abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials

and the most sombre hue, with only that one ornament—the scarlet

letter—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the other

hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say, a

fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm

that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which

appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it

hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her

infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on

wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted

the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have

applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse

garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance

in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of

enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in

her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic—a taste for the

gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her

needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to

exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the

other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it

might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the

passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This

morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it

is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something

doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the

world. With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could

not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more

intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of

Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing

that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word,

and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied,

and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she

inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by

other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart

from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that

revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or

felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred

sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy,

awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact,

and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she

retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her

position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of

forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like

a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor,

as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her

bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succour

them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the

way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness

into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by

which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and

sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s

defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester

had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these

attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her

pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was

patient—a martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in

spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should

stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable

throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the

undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen

paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that brought a

crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.

If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the

Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of

the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had

imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this

dreary woman gliding silently through the town, with never any

companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass,

they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterances of

a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none

the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it

unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame,

that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had

the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves—had

the summer breeze murmured about it—had the wintry blast shrieked it

aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When

strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter—and none ever failed

to do so—they branded it afresh in Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes,

she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the

symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise

its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was

intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always

this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot

never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive

with daily torture.

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt

an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a

momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next

instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;

for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned

alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer

moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the

strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with

those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was

outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester—if altogether

fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted—she felt or

fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new

sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it

gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She

was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were

they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel,

who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half

his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that,

if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze

forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or, must she receive

those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as truth? In all her

miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome

as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent

inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action.

Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic

throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model

of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up,

as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. “What evil thing is at

hand?” would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there

would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this

earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert

itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according

to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom

throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the

burning shame on Hester Prynne’s—what had the two in common? Or, once

more, the electric thrill would give her warning—“Behold Hester, here

is a companion!” and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young

maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly

averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity

were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman

was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or

age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is ever one of

the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not

corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law,

that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was

guilty like herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a

grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story

about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific

legend. They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged

in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be

seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the

night-time. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,

that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern

incredulity may be inclined to admit.

VI.

PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose

innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a

lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty

passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the

growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the

intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features

of this child! Her Pearl—for so had Hester called her; not as a name

expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,

unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she

named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price—purchased with all

she had—her mother’s only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked

this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and

disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it

were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which

man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on

that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the

race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in

heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than

apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no

faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she

looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to

detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the

guiltiness to which she owed her being.

Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its

vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,

the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to

have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the

world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace

which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire,

however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very

garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in

rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better

understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be

procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the

arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before

the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed,

and such was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining

through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler

loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on

the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with

the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s

aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child

there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the

wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of

an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of

passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of

her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to

be herself—it would have been no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly

express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared

to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears

deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which

she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving

her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being

whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in

disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the

point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be

discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and

even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself

had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul

from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of

earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which

were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and,

however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of

crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the

untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare

of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could

recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her

temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency

that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning

radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of

earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind

than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the

rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way

of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the

growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,

nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of

erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own

errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict

control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge.

But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and

frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any

calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside

and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical

compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As

to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or

heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in

accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while

Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,

that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade

or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so

malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that

Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a

human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its

fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit

away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild,

bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness

and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might

vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes

we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush

towards the child—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she

invariably began—to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and

earnest kisses—not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself

that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s

laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made

her mother more doubtful than before.