The Scarlet Letter
A woman, a scarlet letter, and the secret that outlived it
Page 1
In Boston, in the early days of the Massachusetts colony, the prison door swung open and a young woman named Hester Prynne stepped out into the sunlight with a baby in her arms. On the breast of her dress, sewn in scarlet cloth and edged with gold thread, was the letter A — for Adultery, though no one said the word aloud. The magistrates had ordered her to wear it for the rest of her life, and today she must stand for hours on the scaffold in the marketplace, in front of everyone she knew, with her baby, whom she had named Pearl, held tight against her. From the balcony above, old Reverend Wilson called down to her to name the baby's father, so he might stand beside her and share her shame. Beside him stood the young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, pale and strained, urging her gently to speak. Hester looked up at him and said nothing. In the crowd below, a stranger newly arrived in town — small, bent, keen-eyed — watched her with a terrible stillness.
Page 2
That night, back in her cell, Hester was given into the care of a physician the jailer had sent for — a stranger to the town, small and bent, with keen eyes. He gave baby Pearl a draught to quiet her crying, and when the jailer had gone, he let Hester see his face clearly for the first time. She knew him at once. He was Roger Chillingworth, her own husband, long given up for dead after his ship was lost at sea. He was not angry, or not in any way she could see. He told her calmly that he would never tell the town who he was, and she must promise the same — he would be known only as a travelling physician. In return he asked her only one thing: the name of the man who had fathered her child. Hester refused him, just as she had refused the minister on the scaffold. Chillingworth said quietly that he would find the man without her help, and left her alone in the dark.
Page 3
Three years passed. Pearl grew into a quick, strange little girl, bright-eyed and willful, who loved wandering the marshes and woods more than any proper Puritan child should. One autumn day Hester brought her to Governor Bellingham's grand house, for the magistrates were questioning whether such a wild child ought to be taken from a sinful mother and raised by a godly family instead. Old Reverend Wilson tried the child with a plain question — who had made her? — meaning to hear her name God. Pearl only said she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the wild rosebush that grew by the prison door. The governor and Wilson exchanged troubled looks. Then Reverend Dimmesdale, pale and quiet in the corner, spoke up for Hester, saying the bond between a mother and the child of her sin was itself a kind of holiness, and ought not to be broken. Moved by his words, Governor Bellingham let Pearl stay with her mother.
Page 4
On a rocky point at the edge of town, where the forest came down almost to the sea, Hester built a small cottage, and there she and Pearl lived alone, year after year. The townspeople left her mostly in peace now, though they never forgot what the scarlet letter meant, and children sometimes ran from her in the lane. Hester supported them both with her needle — she sewed the finest embroidery in the whole colony, for grand christenings and funerals and even the governor's own ruffs, though never for a wedding. Pearl grew up with no playmates but the wind and the waves and her own wild imagination, decorating herself with seaweed and wildflowers, and often she caught her mother's eye and pointed straight at the scarlet letter, asking what it meant and why the minister held his hand over his heart whenever he passed them. Hester never fully answered her. Alone in her garden in the evenings, she would sometimes see the dark bent shape of Chillingworth passing along the shore, gathering herbs, and feel a chill she could not explain.
Page 5
As the years passed, Reverend Dimmesdale's health began to fail. He grew thin and hollow-eyed, and often pressed a hand to his heart as though it pained him, though no doctor in the colony could say what ailed him. At last the town's leading men asked Roger Chillingworth, the learned new physician, to move into the minister's own house and tend him day and night. Dimmesdale, not knowing who the old man truly was, accepted gratefully, and the two grew close — talking for hours by the fire, Chillingworth asking quiet, searching questions about guilt and secret sin, which seemed to trouble the minister more than any medicine helped him. Late one night, sitting alone with his books after Chillingworth had gone to bed, Dimmesdale fell into one of his private fits of anguish, pressing both hands over his chest. Unseen, Chillingworth had come back to the door and stood watching him from the shadows, and in that moment, watching the minister's suffering, the physician understood at last exactly who had wronged Hester Prynne.
Page 6
One day Hester arranged to meet Reverend Dimmesdale alone on a forest path outside the town, while Pearl played among the trees nearby. There, away from every watching eye, she finally told him the truth she had kept for years: the old physician living in his own house, the one he trusted and confided in, was Roger Chillingworth — her own husband, bent on a slow, secret revenge against him. Dimmesdale was horrified to learn he had been tormented from within his own walls all this time. In her grief at what she had allowed to happen to him, Hester tore the scarlet letter from her dress and threw it down among the dead leaves, and for a moment the two of them spoke together as they once had, and agreed to flee together, with Pearl, on a ship bound for England. But when Hester called Pearl to come to her, the child stood on the far side of the brook and would not cross until her mother had pinned the scarlet letter back onto her dress exactly as before.
Page 7
Down at the harbor, among the creaking ships and stacked barrels, Hester found the master of a vessel bound for England and arranged passage for herself, Pearl, and one more person, to sail four days hence, just after the colony's great Election Day. The captain was cheerful and talkative, and as they settled the matter he mentioned, almost as a pleasantry, that his cabin would be fuller than she knew — an old physician calling himself Roger Chillingworth had come aboard that very morning and asked to join the passenger list too, saying he was a friend of the minister's and wished to travel in his company. Hester's heart went cold. There was no way to warn Dimmesdale now before the appointed day, no way to escape Chillingworth at all; he had learned of their plan and meant to follow them across the ocean. She walked back along the waterfront with Pearl's hand in hers, the ships' masts crowding the sky above her, knowing the escape she had planned so carefully was no escape at all.
Page 8
The day came for the colony's great yearly festival, when a new governor was installed with music and a solemn procession through the streets. Crowds lined the road to watch the magistrates and soldiers pass, and Hester stood among them with Pearl, as she always did, a little apart from the rest. When Reverend Dimmesdale came by, walking among the honored clergy on his way to preach the most important sermon of the year, he seemed, strangely, stronger and more alive than she had seen him in a long time — his step was firm, his head high. Yet when his eyes found hers for just a moment in the crowd, Hester felt a chill, for there was something in his face that told her he was not drawing on any new health at all, but spending the last of himself, all at once, on this single day. Governor Bellingham and old Reverend Wilson walked near him in their formal robes, and the whole town turned out to watch, utterly unaware of what the minister carried hidden beneath his black coat.
Page 9
The meeting house was so full that Hester could not get inside, and she stood instead in the crowd outside with Pearl, listening through the open windows and doors to the rise and fall of Reverend Dimmesdale's voice. It was, everyone agreed afterward, the finest sermon he had ever preached, delivered with such passion and sorrow that many in the crowd outside wept without quite knowing why. Hester listened and felt something different from the others: beneath the beautiful words, she heard the voice of a man saying goodbye. When at last the sermon ended, the congregation began pouring out of the doors in a kind of daze, talking of how they had never heard him speak so movingly, calling him a saint among them, their greatest minister. Hester waited at the edge of the crowd with Pearl's hand in hers, dreading what the procession would do next, for she alone understood what the sermon had truly been.
Page 10
As the procession returned from the meeting house, Reverend Dimmesdale suddenly left the line, walked to the old scaffold where Hester had once stood with baby Pearl, and climbed its steps alone. He called Hester and Pearl up to stand beside him. Chillingworth pushed through the crowd, telling him he was ruining everything, but Dimmesdale said this scaffold was the only place left where he could be saved. Before the whole astonished town, he confessed that he was Pearl's father, that he had stood beside Hester in her shame every day for seven years without once finding the courage to say so aloud. Then he opened his minister's coat and showed the town what he had hidden beneath it all that time. He sank down with his head against Hester's shoulder and died there, in the same place her punishment had begun. Pearl, for the first time in her life, kissed him. Chillingworth, with no more secret revenge left to live for, grew smaller and greyer and died within the year. Hester lived on, and in time came back alone to that same shore, wearing the scarlet letter still, by no one's order but her own.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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