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.
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