No More Learning

But this seldom
happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own
ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter
along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his
own infirmity,--that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,--he
forever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support
external to himself. His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the
convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after
death--is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy
coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This
faith, more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out
of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil
and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the
mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will
raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go
to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at
monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his
Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of
office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease.
Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old
gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of
the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or
he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage
and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the
emphasis to manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of
its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had
already accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much
longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To
confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension,--as it would never
be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,
and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,--it
was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and
decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as
the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official
life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend,--to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and
to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the
sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who
felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the
whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I
was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to adopt the
tone of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages of
official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within
the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the blood-thirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbors--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders,
were a literal fact instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is
my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me--who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of
political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it
were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of
victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see
occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom
ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell!

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if
the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the
accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested
themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was
requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and
vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a
person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and,
although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In
the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years;
a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too
long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no
advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself from
toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me.
Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late
Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized by the Whigs
as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs--his tendency
to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may
meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren
of the same household must diverge from one another--had sometimes
made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no
longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as
settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to
be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been
content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many
worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then
to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy
of a friendly one.

Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or
two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state,
like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be
buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative
self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his
shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that
everything was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper,
and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was
again a literary man.

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life,
and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the
story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of
cheerfulness in the writer's mind; for he was happier, while straying
through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since
he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which
contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and
the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines of such antique
date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty
again. [1] Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the
whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED
SURVEYOR; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too
autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will
readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave.
Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness
to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!

[Footnote 1: At the time of writing this article the author
intended to publish, along with "The Scarlet Letter," several
shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought
advisable to defer. ]

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector,--who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived
forever,--he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with
him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed
and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now
flung aside forever. The merchants,--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard,
Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,--these, and many other names, which had
such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the
world,--how little time has it required to disconnect me from them
all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my
old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist
brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real
earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary
inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes,
and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it
ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.
My good towns-people will not much regret me; for--though it has been
as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this
abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers--_there_ has never
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in
order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst
other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do
just as well without me.

It may be, however,--O, transporting and triumphant thought! --that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come,
among the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out the
locality of THE TOWN PUMP!

[Illustration]




[Illustration: The Prison Door]




[Illustration: Vignette,--Wild Rose]

THE SCARLET LETTER.




I.

THE PRISON-DOOR.


[Illustration]

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray,
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 recognized 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, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which
evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early
borne the black flower of civilized 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 symbolize some
sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

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 and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water
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 demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a
people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in
whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest
and the 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 has
transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer
beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a 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. Madam 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. "

[Illustration: The Gossips]

"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 acquainted only with the gray 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 towns-people and neighbors. 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 splendor 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
lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those
days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the
delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized
as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more
lady-like, 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
something 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 Madam 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! "

"O, peace, neighbors, 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, Madam 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 school-boys, 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 demeanor
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 gray 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 bald 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
lamplight 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, gray houses, the huge
cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in
architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her,
still in connection 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
towns-people 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!

[Illustration: "Standing on the Miserable Eminence"]

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!




[Illustration]

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 endeavored 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 next 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 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 favor, 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. "Madam
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 behooves 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 honor. 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 gray 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 behooves 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; a 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 fervor 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 labor. 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 to 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 recognized. "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! "

[Illustration: "She was led back to Prison"]

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 sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanor,
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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

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
demeanor 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 recognize 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.