C 15
So Roger ChillingworthÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men’s memories longer than they likedÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯took leave of
Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He
gathered here and there a 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?
“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she 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 could have been! She marvelled how she could ever
have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed in her crime
most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated
the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her
lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler
offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since
been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he
had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.
“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester more bitterly than before. “He
betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable
fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch
than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be
reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of
happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm
reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice.
What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the
scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery and wrought out no
repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise
have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
“Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss
for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of
herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own
image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, andÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯as it
declined to ventureÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of
impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that
either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better
pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them
with snailshells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than
any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered
near the shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made
prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the
warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that streaked the line of
the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it
with winged footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they fell.
Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along the
shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and,
creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed
remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white
breast, Pearl was almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered
away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up
her sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being
that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume
the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for
devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s
garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated, as best she could, on
her own bosom the decoration with which she was so familiar on her
mother’s. A letterÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯the letter AÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯but freshly green instead of scarlet.
The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this
device with strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which
she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.
“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.
Just then she heard her mother’s voice, and, flitting along as lightly
as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne
dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her
bosom.
“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green
letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou
know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed
to wear?”
“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast
taught me in the horn-book. ”
Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that
singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black
eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any
meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the
point.
“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”
“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother’s
face. “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over
his heart!”
“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning
pale.
“What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”
“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously
than she was wont to speak. “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast
been talking with,Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯it may be he can tell. But in good earnest now,
mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯and why dost thou
wear it on thy bosom?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯and why does the minister keep his hand
over his heart?”
She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and
capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child
might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence,
and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to
establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an
unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with
the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little
other return than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends
its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is
petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you,
when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours
it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a
kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then
be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at
your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s
disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable
traits, and have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea
came strongly into Hester’s mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable
precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age
when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as
much of her mother’s sorrows as could be imparted, without
irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of
Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging and could have
been from the very firstÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯the steadfast principles of an unflinching
courageÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯an uncontrollable willÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯sturdy pride, which might be
disciplined into self-respectÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯and a bitter scorn of many things
which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood
in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and
disagreeable, as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these
sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from
her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out
of this elfish child.
Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the
scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest
epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her
appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a
design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this
marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself
to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a
purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained
with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly
child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay
cold in her mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯and to
help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither
dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like
heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind,
with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been
whispered into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while,
holding her mother’s hand in both her own, and turning her face
upward, while she put these searching questions, once and again,
and still a third time.
“What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it?
and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”
“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! if this be the
price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it. ”
Then she spoke aloudÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many
things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of
the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the
sake of its gold thread.”
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before
been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the
talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now
forsook her; as recognising that, in spite of his strict watch over her
heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never
been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of
her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three
times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at
supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after
she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief
gleaming in her black eyes.
“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”
And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being
awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that
other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her
investigations about the scarlet letterÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯
“Mother!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯Mother!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯Why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?”
“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not
tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!”
