The Scarlet Letter. Натаниель Готорн

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       CHAPTER 3

      The Recognition

      From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb, was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilised and savage costume.

      He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom, with so convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it.

      At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognise him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.

      Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he addressed him, in a formal and courteous manner—

      ‘I pray you, good sir,’ said he, ‘who is this woman? – and wherefore is she here set up to public shame?’

      ‘You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,’ answered the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, ‘else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.’

      ‘You say truly,’ replied the other; ‘I am a stranger, and have been a wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne’s – have I her name rightly? – of this woman’s offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?’

      ‘Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,’ said the townsman, ‘to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance—’

      ‘Ah! – aha! – I conceive you,’ said the stranger, with a bitter smile. ‘So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by your favour, sir, may be the father of yonder babe – it is some three or four months old, I should judge – which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?’

      ‘Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who shall expound it is yet awanting,’ answered the townsman. ‘Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.’

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