THE SCARLET LETTER
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
CHAPTER 1 THE PRISON-DOOR.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored
garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats,
intermixed with women, some wearing hoods
and others bareheaded, was assembled in front
of a wooden edifice, the door of which was
heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever
Utopia of human virtue and happiness
they might originally project, have
invariably recognized it among their
earliest practical necessities to allot a
portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery,
and another portion as the site of a prison.
In accordance with this rule, it may
safely be assumed that the forefathers
of Boston had built the first
prison-house somewhere in the vicinity
of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as
they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round
about his grave, which subsequently
became the nucleus of all the
congregated sepulchres in the old
churchyard of King's Chapel.
Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty
years after the settlement of the town,
the wooden jail was already marked
with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet
darker aspect to its beetle-browed and
gloomy front. The rust on the
ponderous iron-work of its oaken door
looked more antique than anything else
in the New World. Like all that pertains
to crime, it seemed never to have
known a youthful era.
Before this ugly edifice, and between it
and the wheel-track of the street, was a
grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock,
pigweed, apple- peru, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found
something congenial in the soil that had so
early borne the black flower of civilized
society, a prison.
But on one side of the portal, and rooted
almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month of June,
with its delicate gems, which might be
imagined to offer their fragrance and
fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went
in, and to the condemned criminal as he
came forth to his doom, in token that the
deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been
kept alive in history; but whether it had merely
survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long
after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that
originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as
there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung
up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann
Hutchinson, as she entered the
prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to
determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold
of our narrative, which is now about
to issue from that inauspicious
portal, we could hardly do otherwise
than pluck one of its flowers, and
present it to the reader. It may serve,
let us hope, to symbolize some
sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human
frailty and sorrow.
CHAPTER 2 THE MARKET-PLACE.
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison
Lane, on a certain summer morning, not
less than two centuries ago, was occupied
by a pretty large number of the inhabitants
of Boston; all with their eyes intently
fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.
Amongst any other population, or at a later
period in the history of New England, the
grim rigidity that petrified the bearded
physiognomies of these good people
would have augured some awful business
in hand.
It could have betokened nothing short of the
anticipated execution of some noted culprit,
on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had
but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment.
But, in that early severity of the Puritan
character, an inference of this kind could not
so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a
sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child,
whom his parents had given over to the civil
authority, was to be corrected at the
whipping-post.
It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or
other heterodox religionist was to be scourged
out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian,
whom the white man's fire-water had made
riotous about the streets, was to be driven with
stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be,
too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter- tempered widow of the magistrate, was to
die upon the gallows.
In either case, there was very much the
same solemnity of demeanor on the
part of the spectators; as befitted a
people amongst whom religion and law
were almost identical, and in whose
character both were so thoroughly
interfused, that the mildest and the
severest acts of public discipline were
alike made venerable and awful.
Meagre, indeed, and cold was the
sympathy that a transgressor might
look for, from such bystanders, at the
scaffold.
On the other hand, a penalty, which, in our
days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy
and ridicule, might then be invested with almost
as stern a dignity as the punishment of death
itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the
summer morning when our story begins its
course, that the women, of whom there
were several in the crowd, appeared to
take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The
age had not so much refinement, that any
sense of impropriety restrained the
wearers of petticoat and farthingale from
stepping forth into the public ways, and
wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if
occasion were, into the throng nearest to
the scaffold at an execution.
Morally, as well as materially, there was
a coarser fibre in those wives and
maidens of old English birth and
breeding, than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six
or seven generations; for, throughout
that chain of ancestry, every successive
mother has transmitted to her child a
fainter bloom, a more delicate and
briefer beauty, and a slighter physical
frame, if not a character of less force
and solidity, than her own.
The women who were now standing about
the prison-door stood within less than half a
century of the period when the man-like
Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. They
were her countrywomen; and the beef and
ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a
whit more refined, entered largely into their
composition. The bright morning sun,
therefore, shone on broad shoulders and
well-developed busts, and on round and
ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off
island, and had hardly yet grown paler or
thinner in the atmosphere of New England.
There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity
of speech among these matrons, as most of
them seemed to be, that would startle us at the
present day, whether in respect to its purport or
its volume of tone.
"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty,
"I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly
for the public behoof, if we women, being of
mature age and church-members in good
repute, should have the handling of such
malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What
think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for
judgment before us five, that are now here in a
knot together, would she come off with such a
sentence as the worshipful magistrates have
awarded?
Marry, I trow not!" "People say," said
another, "that the Reverend Master
Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very
grievously to heart that such a scandal
should have come upon his congregation."
"The magistrates are God-fearing
gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is
a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At
the very least, they should have put the
brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's
forehead. Madam Hester would have
winced at that, I warrant me. But she,—the
naughty baggage,—little will she care what
they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why,
look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or
such like heathenish adornment, and so
walk the streets as brave as ever!"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a
young wife, holding a child by the
hand, "let her cover the mark as she
will, the pang of it will be always in
her heart."
"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether
on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her
forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as
well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted
judges. "This woman has brought shame upon
us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it?
Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the
statute- book.
Then let the magistrates, who have
made it of no effect, thank themselves if
their own wives and daughters go
astray!" "Mercy on us, goodwife,"
exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there
no virtue in woman, save what springs
from a wholesome fear of the gallows?
That is the hardest word yet! Hush,
now, gossips! for the lock is turning in
the prison-door, and here comes
Mistress Prynne herself."
The door of the jail being flung open from
within, there appeared, in the first place,
like a black shadow emerging into
sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of
the town-beadle, with a sword by his side,
and his staff of office in his hand. This
personage prefigured and represented in
his aspect the whole dismal severity of the
Puritanic code of law, which it was his
business to administer in its final and
closest application to the offender.
Stretching forth the official staff in his left
hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of
a young woman, whom he thus drew
forward; until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action
marked with natural dignity and force of
character, and stepped into the open air,
as if by her own free will.
She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some
three months old, who winked and turned aside
its little face from the too vivid light of day;
because its existence, heretofore, had brought it
acquainted only with the gray twilight of a
dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the
prison.
When the young woman—the mother of this
child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it
seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the
infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an
impulse of motherly affection, as that she might
thereby conceal a certain token, which was
wrought or fastened into her dress. In a
moment, however, wisely judging that one token
of her shame would but poorly serve to hide
another, she took the baby on her arm, and,
with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile,
and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her towns-people and neighbors.