Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed,
and he careering on it; morning came, and peeped,
blushing, through the curtains; and at last sunrise
threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it right
across the minister’s bedazzled eyes. There
he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and
a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind
him!
Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new
Governor was to receive his office at the hands of
the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl came into
the market-place. It was already thronged with
the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the
town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise,
were many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins
marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements,
which surrounded the little metropolis of the colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions
for seven years past, Hester was clad in a garment
of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than
by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion,
it had the effect of making her fade personally out
of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter
brought her back from this twilight indistinctness,
and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own
illumination. Her face, so long familiar to
the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which
they were accustomed to behold there. It was
like a mask; or, rather like the frozen calmness of
a dead woman’s features; owing this dreary resemblance
to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect
to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of
the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected
now; unless some preternaturally gifted observer should
have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought
a corresponding development in the countenance and
mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived,
that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through
several miserable years as a necessity, a penance,
and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely
and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long
been agony into a kind of triumph. “Look
your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!”—the
people’s victim and lifelong bond-slave, as
they fancied her, might say to them. “Yet
a little while, and she will be beyond your reach!
A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious ocean
will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye
have caused to burn on her bosom!” Nor were
it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned
to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret
in Hester’s mind, at the moment when she was
about to win her freedom from the pain which had been
thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might
