CHAPTER X.
THE SINNER THAT REPENTETH.
The cause of Hester's degradation was one which always has, and one fears always will, people our streets with those unhappy women, whom the law refuses either to acknowledge or to suppress—refuses either to protect or to punish: a lasting stigma upon our civilization!
When Sir Chetsom Chetsom was killed, she had to look about her for means of subsistence; and at first imagined that literature would be an ample field.
Thanks to the diffusion of knowledge, and to the increasing taste for reading, it is now very possible for man or woman to earn a decent and honourable livelihood by the pen; but if possible, it is not easy, and is always, with the best of talents, eminently precarious. For a woman still more so than for a man. Above all, the woman must have good friends, must be "respectable," and fortunate.
Hester had no good friends; she had many acquaintances, but no one who interested himself in her success, no one, at any rate, who both could and would assist her. Moreover, she was not "respectable;" and what was the consequence? dissolute editors were afraid of her contributions "on the score of morals."
To be brief, Hester struggled in vain to get employment; and in great danger of starving, she determined to go back to Walton. Her father consented to receive his unhappy child, and promised that "bye-gones should be bye-gones."
She had better have taken a situation as servant of all-work in a lodginghouse, than have returned to her home after what had occurred. She found her father, indeed, glad enough to receive her, and willing enough to forgive the past, on condition of not absolutely forgetting it: from time to time he could not refrain from "throwing it in her teeth," when he was at a loss for an argument or an invective.
This is always the case when a fallen daughter returns home, or when she commits the one unpardonable fault, and stays at home: her parents, her brothers, and sisters—oh! especially the sisters—never forget that fault. It is held over her head in terrorem. It is an ever-present warning and illustration. Bridling up in their unshaken chastity—too often unshaken because untempted—the sisters make her feel in a hundred ways, that her fault is unpardoned and unpardonable. Exasperated by this incessant and unjust retribution for a fault which the girl feels deserves more pity, she is at last driven from home and takes refuge in the streets, because her virtuous family cannot forget!
It has been often remarked that women are more pitiless towards each other, on that very point where common sympathy should make them most tolerant; and little do they know the extent of the mischief their intolerance creates.