Martinsburg independent. [volume] (Martinsburg, W. Va.) 1875-1900, 1892-04-30
CHAPTER ".
uEsTER AT HER NEEDLE.

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 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 ten
sion Of the nerves and by all the COM
bative energy of her character, which
enabled her to convert the scene into
kind Of lurid triumph.
1t was, moreover, separate and in
sulated event, to occur but once in her
lifetime, and to meet which, therefore,
reckless of economy, she might call NJ
the vital strength that would have suf-
feed for many quiet years. The very
law that condemned her--a giant of
stern features, but with vigor to sup
port, as well as to annihilate, in his iron
arm-had held her up, through the ter
rible 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 I'M
utterably grievous to be borne.
The days of the far off future would
toll onward, still with the same burden
for her to take up and bear along with
her, but never to fling down, for the ac-
cumulating 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 witty and embody their i'm
ages of woman's frailty and sinful pas
sion. 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 honorable parents; at her, the
mother of a babe that would hereafter
be 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.
1t 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 re-
mote and so obscure-free to return to
her birthplace or to any other European
land, and there hide her character and
identity under new exterior, as COM
pletely 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 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 fatality,
feeling SO irresistible and inevitable
: that it has the force of doom, which al
most invariably compels human beings
to inger around and haunt, ghostlike,
the spot where some great and marked
event has given the color to their life
time, 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. 1t
was as if a new birth, with stronger
assimilations than the first, had con-
verted the forest land, still so uncon-
genial to every other pilgrim and
wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild
and dreary but lifelong home. All other
scenes Of earth-even that village Of
rural England, where happy infancy
and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to
be in her mothers keeping, like gar
ments put off long ago-were foreign to
her in comparison. The chain that
bound her here was of iron links and
CALLING to her Utmost soul, but could
never be broken.
1t might be, too-doubtless it was so,
although she hid the secret from her
self and grew pale whenever it strug-
gled out of her heart, like a serpent
from its hole-it might be that another
feeling kept her within the scene and
pathway that had been so fatal There
dwelt, there trod the feet Of one with
whom she deemed herself connected In
a union that, unrecognized on earth,
would bring them together before the
bar Of final judgment and make that
their marriage altar for joint futurity
of endless retribution. Over and over
again the tempter Of souls had thrust
this idea upon Hester's contemplation,
and laughed at the passionate and des.
perate Joy with which she seized and
then strove to cast it from her. She
barely looked the idea in the face and
fastened TO bar 1t in its dungeon. What
she compelled herself to beleve-what
finally she reasoned upon as her motive
for continuing a resident Of New Eng
land-was half a truth and half a self
delusion. Here, she said to herself, had
been the scene of her guilt, and here
should be the scene Of her earthly pun
ishment; and SO, perchance. the torture
~ asr daily shame would at length
purge her soul and work out another
purity than that which she had lost
more saintlike, because the result OF
martyrdom.
Hester Prynne therefore did not flee.
On the outskirts of the town, within the
verge of the peninsula, but not in close
vicinity to any other habitation, there
was small matched cottage. It had
been built by an earlier settler and aban'
doned because the soil about it was toe
sterile for cultivation, while its com
parative remoteness put it out of the
sphere Of that social activity which al
ready marked the habits Of the emf
grants. 1t stosd on the shore looking
across basin of the sea at the foresi
covered hills, toward the west. A clumy
of scrubby trees, such as alone grew On
the peninsula, did not so much concea,
the cottage from view, as seem to denote
that here was some object which would
fain have been, or at least ought to be
concealed. In this little, lonesome dwell
ing, with some slender means that sh.
possessed, and by the license Of the mag
istrates, who still kept an inquisitoria
watch over her, Hester established her
self with her infant child A mystic
shadow of suspicion Immediately at
tached itself to the spot Children, tos
young to comprehend wherefore thu
woman should be set out from the spher'