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 recognised. “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!”
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 sympathise with its trouble. With the same
hard demeanour, 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.
