The Scarlet Letter

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.