Chapter Chapter 5 · HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

. 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 than 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 of 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 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—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 birth-place,

or to any other European land, and there hide her character and

identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into

another state of being—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, a feeling so

irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, 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; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge

that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which 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 life-long 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 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, 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.

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, were, as a matter of

policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and 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—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 labour 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 circumstance 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 requited 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

needle-work 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 moulder 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 vigour 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 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, 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 rude handiwork. She had in

her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic—a taste for the

gorgeously beautiful, which, save 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 matter 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

Cain. 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 human kind. 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 scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she

retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her

position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of

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 the hand that was stretched forth to succour

them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the

way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil 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 sufferer’s

defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester

had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these

attacks, save 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 forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in

spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing 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 none

the less 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

aloud! 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’s soul; so that, oftentimes,

she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the

symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise

its own anguish to inflict. Its cool 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—a 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 anew. (Had Hester sinned

alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer

moral and intellectual fibre 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 Hester—if altogether

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, yet 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, that 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

inopportuneness 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 reverence looked up,

as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. “What evil thing is at

hand?” would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there

would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this

earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert

itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according

to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom

throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s 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, wouldst thou 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 hard 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 averred 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

night-time. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,

that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern

incredulity may be inclined to admit.

VI.