“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, from this secret bond.
“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead. Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest[10] of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, his fame, his position, his life will be in my hands. Beware!”
“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.
“Swear it!” rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, “I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares?”
“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man[11] that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?”
“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”
V
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 seemed to her 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 than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described. 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 event, to meet which she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison door, began the daily custom. 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. 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. 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 that 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 marvellous that, with the world before her – free to return to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, – and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open 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 marvellous 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, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too – doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself – that another feeling kept her within the scene that had been so fatal. 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. What she compelled herself to believe 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.
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. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills. 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 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, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art of needle-work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill.
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 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 were marked by a sombre, 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, too there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen 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 because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description. 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 doom 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 airy 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 she employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, 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 matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.