The Scarlet Letter five 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 then 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 if 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 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 marvelous 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 birthplace or to any other European land and their hide her character and identity under a new exterior as completely as if he merging into another state of being and having also the passes of the dark inscrutable forest opened 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 marvelous 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 ghosts like the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime and still the more irresistible the darker the tinge that saddens it her sin her ignominy were the roots but 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 lifelong 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 gollin to her inmost soul but could never be broken it might be to 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 Troad 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 he or 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 seemed 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 license 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 my enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage window or standing in the doorway or laboring in her little garden or coming forth along the pathway that led town word and discerning The Scarlet Letter on her breast would scamper off with a strange contagious fear lonely as was Hester 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 needlework 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 characterized 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 whereas a matter of policy marked by a stately and well conducted ceremonial and a somber 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 - 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 labor 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 star stance 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 required 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 needlework 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 molder 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 vigor 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 doomed 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 area 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 a rude handiwork she had in her nature a rich voluptuous oriental characteristic a taste for the gorgeously beautiful which saved 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 mater 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 cane 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 humankind 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 score and besides seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart it was not an age of delicacy at her position although she understood it well and was in little danger 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 to the hand that was stretched forth to succor them Dame's of elevated rank likewise whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation we're accustomed to distill 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 sufferers defenseless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound Hester had schooled herself long and well and she never responded to these attacks saved 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 forbore to pray for enemies lest in spite of her forgiving aspirations the words that the blessings 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 nonetheless 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 allowed 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 soul so that oftentimes she could scarcely refrain yet always did refrained from covering the symbol with her hand but then again and accustomed I had likewise its own anguish to inflict it school 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 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 Anu had Hester sinned alone her imagination was somewhat affected and had she been of a softer moral and intellectual fiber 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 test her if all together 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 it 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 but 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 in opportunist 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 reference looked up as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels what evil thing is at hand would has to say to herself lifting her reluctant eyes there would be nothing human within the scope of view saved the form of this earthly Saint again a mystic sisterhood would contumacious Li assert itself as she met the sanctified frown of some matron who according to the rumor of all tongues had kept cold snow with in her bosom throughout life that unsung snow in the matrons 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 what's that 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 heart 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 avert 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 nighttime and we must need say it's seared Hester's bosom so deeply that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit