VI

Pearl

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose innocent life had sprung 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 Pearl – for so had Hester called her – as being of great price – purchased with all she had – her mother’s only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child! 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. The child had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty. 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 that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her. 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, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost.

This outward mutability indicated the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety. But 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. Hester could only account for the child’s character by recalling what she herself had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world. 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.

Mindful of her own errors and misfortunes, Hester Prynne 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. 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. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came between herself and her sole treasure, who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, 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 like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or, rarely, she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her mother in broken words. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but 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; until little Pearl awoke!

How soon indeed did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! 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. 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 with which the child comprehended her loneliness, the whole peculiarity 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 tripping along at the rate of three footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the settlement 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 gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.

These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value 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 out of Hester’s heart.

At home Pearl wanted not a wide circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects. The unlikeliest materials without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. The pine-trees, aged, black and flinging groans, 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 always in a state of preternatural activity. 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 armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad 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.

One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The very first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was 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. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of 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 Hester had never felt a moment’s safety. 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 and always with that peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes.

Once while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; suddenly 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 whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl’s wild eyes. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a fiend peeping out 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.

“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, pressing herself close to Hester’s knees.

“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!”

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the child.

“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly Father!”

“Hush, Pearl! Thou must not talk so! He sent us all into the world! Or, if not, whence didst thou come?”

“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl laughing and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal labyrinth of doubt. She remembered – betwixt a smile and a shudder – the talk of the 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, to promote some foul and wicked purpose.