In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester
Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the
clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His
moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It
grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual
faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps
acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from
all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate
action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's
well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor fallen man had
once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror
with which he had appealed to her--the outcast woman--for
support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little
accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her
ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself,
Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a responsibility
upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no
other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her
to the rest of humankind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or
whatever the material--had all been broken. Here was the iron
link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like
all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.
Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in
which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy.
Years had come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her
mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its
fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the
townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out
in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time,
interferes neither with public nor individual interests and
convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up
in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play,
it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and
quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the
change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the
original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester Prynne
there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled
with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst
usage; she made no claim upon it in requital for what she
suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also, the
blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she
had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour.
With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no
hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only
be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor
wanderer to its paths.