"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his
head. "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the
ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me,
nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not at
least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be
known--he will be known!--he will be known!"
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and
whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made
their way through the crowd.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her
pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger--so fixed
a gaze that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects
in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her.
Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than
even to meet him as she now did, with the hot mid-day sun
burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the
scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant
in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival,
staring at the features that should have been seen only in the
quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or
beneath a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was
conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand
witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him
and her, than to greet him face to face--they two alone. She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.
Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind
her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and
solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.
"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.
It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on
which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open
gallery, appended to the meeting-house. It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the
magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we
are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four
sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of
honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath--a
gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in
his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be the head and
representative of a community which owed its origin and
progress, and its present state of development, not to the
impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of
manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much,
precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other
eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when
the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of
Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and
sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been
easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who
should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring
woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than
the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned
her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy
she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the
multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the
unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.