"May God forgive thee!" said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!"
He fixed his dying eyes on the woman and the child.
"My little Pearl," he said feebly, "thou wilt kiss me. Hester, farewell. God knows, and He is merciful! His will be done! Farewell."
That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder.
After many days there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold. Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a scarlet letter imprinted in the flesh. Others denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant's. According to these highly respectable witnesses the minister's confession implied no part of the guilt of Hester Prynne, but was to teach us that we were all sinners alike. Old Roger Chillingworth died and bequeathed his property to little Pearl.
For years the mother and child lived in England, and then Pearl married, and Hester returned alone to the little cottage by the forest.
The House of the Seven Gables
"The House of the Seven Gables," published in 1851, was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne directly after "The Scarlet Letter," and though not equal to that remarkable book, was full worthy of its author's reputation, and brought no disappointment to those who looked for great things from his pen. It seemed to James Russell Lowell "the highest art" to typify, "in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor the colonel, that intimate relationship between the present and the past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook." Here, as in "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne is unsparing in his analysis of the meaning of early American Puritanism--its intolerance and its strength.