San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1892-06-15
CHAPTER ".
HESTER 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 un-
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 &C
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 vivify 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 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 a people whose
customs and life were alien from the
law that had condemned her-it NAV
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 linger around and haunt, ghostlike
the spot where some great and marked
event has given the color to their life
t;ro, and still the more irresistibly, tn,
w