The Scarlet Letter

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.