HESTER AND PEARL.

So Roger Chillingworth--a deformed old figure, with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked--took leave of Hester
Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and
there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his
arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward.
Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic
curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be
blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps,
sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of
herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would
not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his
eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown,
that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that
every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious
and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly
everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather
seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity,
whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would
he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted
spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade,
dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the
climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or
would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier,
the higher he rose towards heaven?

[Illustration: "He gathered herbs here and there"]

"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as she still gazed
after him, "I hate the man!"

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or
lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days,
in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the
seclusion of his study, and sit down in the firelight of their home,
and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in
that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours
among his books might be taken off the scholar's heart. Such scenes
had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through
the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves
among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes coul