Hester Returns and Resumes the Scarlet Letter

After many years abroad, Hester Prynne returned to New England and took up her long-forsaken shame. One afternoon, some children at play near the cottage by the sea-shore beheld a tall woman in a gray robe approach the door. In all those years it had never once been opened; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments—and, at all events, went in. On the threshold she paused and turned partly round, for the idea of entering alone, all so changed, the home of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. Her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast. Hester Prynne had returned, and resumed—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it—the symbol of which so dark a tale had been related. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom.

The Return and the Resumption of the Letter

Hester's return was not compelled by any external authority. The magistrates, who had once sentenced her to wear the scarlet letter for life, would not have enforced it after so many years. Yet she chose to resume the badge of shame, and never afterwards did it quit her bosom. In the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. As Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded because unvalued and unsought—came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy. Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Pearl's Fate and Hester's Later Life

Where little Pearl was during these years remained unknown. If still alive, she must have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave, or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness. But through the remainder of Hester's life there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles, too—little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance—that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at the impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant thus apparelled been shown to the sober-hued community. The gossips of that day believed—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed, and one of his recent successors in office faithfully believes—that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother, and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

Death and the Shared Tombstone

After many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of the now concluded legend: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES."