Explore "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Roger Chillingworth took his leave of Hester Prynne. He was a deformed old figure, with a face that lingered unpleasantly in people’s memories. As he stooped away, he gathered an herb here, dug up a root there, and put them into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground as he crept along. Hester stared after him for a while, half-imagining that his feet might burn the early spring grass on which he walked. She wondered what sort of herbs the old man was gathering so purposefully. Wouldn’t the earth, awakened to his evil purpose, send poisonous shrubs growing up beneath his fingers? Wouldn’t it suit him if his touch converted every good and wholesome thing into something diseased and harmful? Did the sun, which shined so brightly everywhere else, really fall on him? Or was there, as it seemed, a circle of ominous shadow following him wherever he turned? And where was he going now? Would he suddenly sink into the earth, leaving barren ground behind? Would poisonous plants grow up where he had vanished? Or would he spread bat‘s wings and fly away, looking uglier the closer he came to Heaven?
“Whether or not it’s a sin,” said Hester bitterly, as she stared after him, “I hate the man!”