C 6
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant that little creature, whose
innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a
lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty
passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched
the growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and
the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny
features of this child! Her PearlÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯for so had Hester called her; not as
a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm,
white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the
comparison. But she named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great
priceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯purchased with all she hadÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯her mother’s only treasure! How
strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet
letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human
sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a
direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given
her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured
bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of
mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven! Yet these
thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehension.
She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith,
therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she looked
fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to detect
some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the
guiltiness to which she owed her being.
Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the
infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to have
been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the world’s first
parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not
invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple,
always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that
precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds.
Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood
hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and
allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and
decoration of the dresses which the child wore before the public eye.
So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed, and such
was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining through the
gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness,
that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on the
darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with
the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s
aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child
there were many children, comprehending the full scope between
the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little,
of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of
passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of
her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased
to be herselfÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯it would have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared
to possess depth, too, as well as variety; butÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯or else Hester’s fears
deceived herÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into
which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules.
In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result
was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant,
but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst
which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible
to be discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯and even then most vaguely and imperfectlyÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯by recalling what
she herself had been during that momentous period while Pearl was
imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from
its material of earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the
medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays
of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had
taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black
shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance.
Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was
perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate,
defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the
very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in
her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a
young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence,
might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid
kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application
of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in
the way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome
regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester
Prynne, nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little
risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her
own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but
strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her
charge. But the task was beyond her skill. after testing both smiles
and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed
any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand
aside and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses.
Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it
lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her
mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother,
while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar
look, that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist,
persuade or plead.
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes
so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl
was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after
playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor,
would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared
in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange
remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air,
and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not
whence and goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was
constrained to rush towards the childÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯to pursue the little elf in the
flight which she invariably beganÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯to snatch her to her bosom with a
close pressure and earnest kissesÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯not so much from overflowing
love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not
utterly delusive. But Pearl’s laugh, when she was caught, though full
of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than
before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought
so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into
passionate tears. Then, perhapsÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯for there was no foreseeing how it
might affect herÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and
harden her small features into a stern, unsympathising look of
discontent. Not seldom she would laugh anew, and louder than
before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯but this more rarely happenedÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯she would be convulsed with rage
of grief and sob out her love for her mother in broken words, and
seem intent on proving that she had a heart by breaking it. Yet
Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness:
it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters,
the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-
word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.
Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep.
Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious
happiness; untilÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering
from beneath her opening lidsÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯little Pearl awoke!
How soonÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯with what strange rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at
an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s
ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness
would it have been could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-
like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have
distinguished and unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the
entangled outcry of a group of sportive children. But this could never
be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,
emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened
infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it
seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness: the
destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the
whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children.
Never since her release from prison had Hester met the public gaze
without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there:
first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small
companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp,
and tripping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of
Hester’s. She saw the children of the settlement on the grassy
margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting
themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would
permit! playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging
Quakers, or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring
one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed
intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she
would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they
sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny
wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent
exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so
much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant
brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and
child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not
unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment,
and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to
rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a
kind of value, and even comfort for the mother; because there was at
least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful
caprice that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It
appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy
reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and
passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester’s
heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of
seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed
to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester
Prynne before Pearl’s birth, but had since begun to be soothed away
by the softening influences of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted
not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went
forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a
thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be
applied. The unlikeliest materialsÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯were the puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing
any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama
occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a
multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The
pine-trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other
melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to
figure as Puritan elders the ugliest weeds of the garden were their
children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully. It
was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her
intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing,
always in a state of preternatural activityÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯soon sinking down, as if
exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of lifeÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯and succeeded by
other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as
the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise
of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there
might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright
faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was
thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The
singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all
these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She never created a
friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s
teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom
she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sadÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯then what depth of
sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the causeÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯to observe,
in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and
so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause
in the contest that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her
knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have
hidden, but which made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a
groanÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯”O Father in HeavenÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯if Thou art still my FatherÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯what is
this being which I have brought into the world?” And Pearl,
overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtile
channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and
beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like
intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told.
The very first thing which she had noticed in her life, wasÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯what?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯
not the mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that
faint, embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully
afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a
smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to
become aware wasÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯shall we say it?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯the scarlet letter on Hester’s
bosom! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant’s
eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery
about the letter; and putting up her little hand she grasped at it,
smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her face
the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester
Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it
away, so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of
Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if her mother’s agonised gesture were
meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes,
and smile. From that epoch, except when the child was asleep,
Hester had never felt a moment’s safety: not a moment’s calm
enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during
which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter;
but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden
death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd expression of the
eyes.
Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of
doing; and suddenly for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts,
are pestered with unaccountable delusions she fancied that she
beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small
black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling
malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known
full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them.
It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then
peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been
tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of
wild flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom;
dancing up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet
letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her
clasped hands. But whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling
that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain,
she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly
into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost
invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with
hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to
seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child
stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a
fiend peeping outÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so
imagined itÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.
“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.
But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and
down with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next
freak might be to fly up the chimney.
“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment,
with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s
wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she
were not acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might
not now reveal herself.
“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.
“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother
half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came
over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what
thou art, and who sent thee hither?”
“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester,
and pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”
“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness
of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or
because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger
and touched the scarlet letter.
“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly
Father!”
“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother.
suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into the world. He sent even
me, thy mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and
elfish child, whence didst thou come?”
“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but
laughing and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”
But Hester could not resolve the query, using herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She rememberedÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯betwixt a smile and a shudder
Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly
elsewhere for the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd
attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring:
such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen
on earth, through the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote
some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of
his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl
the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned among
the New England Puritans.
