Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was
to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne
and little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already
thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of
the town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were
many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as
belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded
the little metropolis of the colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven
years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth.
Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in
its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out
of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under
the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long
familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which
they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask; or,
rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had
departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now;
unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first
read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding
development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the
multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter
and its wearer!"--the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave,
as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature,
should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there
not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless
draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all
her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured. The wine
of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed
rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden
beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the
lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a
cordial of intensest potency.