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.